The FCC should reconsider its decision to approve without prior...
The FCC should reconsider its decision to approve without prior public notice a transaction that gave Sprint Nextel majority control of Clearwire, Clearwire investor Crest Financial said Friday in a filing. Sprint had bought Clearwire stock owned by Eagle River…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Investment in November, which gave it 50.45 percent ownership of Clearwire. Crest owns about 8 percent of Clearwire. “Sprint portrayed the Eagle River transaction to the Commission staff as a pro forma matter for which public notice and review above the staff level were unnecessary,” counsel for Crest Financial said in the petition. “Far from being a non-substantial matter, the Eagle River transaction gave Sprint both de jure and de facto control over Clearwire. Therefore, the public should have been given notice and afforded the opportunity to comment upon it.” The transaction was also a preliminary step in Sprint’s more recent bid to acquire full ownership of Clearwire, Crest’s counsel said (http://xrl.us/bn9s9b). Sprint reached a deal Dec. 17 to buy the remaining 49 percent of Clearwire for $2.2 billion (CD Dec 18 p7). The filing, released Monday, followed Crest’s announcement Friday that it plans to ask the FCC to block Sprint’s Clearwire purchase and a separate deal that gave Japanese telecom company SoftBank 70 percent ownership of Sprint. Both deals would undermine the value of Clearwire’s spectrum and could lower the value of spectrum the government plans to auction in the future, Crest said. The comment deadline on both deals is Jan. 28, the FCC said. Crest also filed a lawsuit in December in the Delaware Court of Chancery to stop the SoftBank deal, Reuters reported.