April 6 (SeeNews) - The European Commission said on Monday that it has cleared the acquisition of Bulgarian Telecommunications Company (BTC) by Dutch-based telecommunications and media company United Group, owned by UK private equity firm BC Partners.
The proposed transaction would raise no competition concerns given the very limited increase in the merged entity's market position and the presence of several other players in the market of retail supply of Pay-TV services (via Internet) in Bulgaria, the European Commission said in a statement.
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"The Commission also found that the vertical links between the upstream markets for wholesale mobile and fixed call termination services and the downstream markets for retail mobile and fixed telecommunications services arising from the transaction would not be problematic," the EU's executive body added.
In November last year, United Group said that it has agreed to acquire BTC, which operates under the Vivacom brand, but did not disclose the price of the transaction. Subsequently, the company announced plans to place some 1.795 billion euro ($1.9 billion) worth of bonds to finance the acquisition and refinance existing debt instruments.
BTC, which has over 1.8 million customers in Bulgaria, competes with A1 Bulgaria, a unit of A1 Telekom Austria, and Telenor Bulgaria, a unit of Czech-owned PPF Group.
($ = 0.925560 euro)