(OTTAWA) Canada’s Competition Tribunal has ruled the July 8 Rogers Communications outage was relevant to upcoming hearings into the telecom giant’s $26 billion takeover of Shaw Communications.
Posted yesterday at 2:53 p.m.
The court issued its ruling on Friday, after hearing submissions from Rogers and the competition commissioner on the matter.
The outage affected millions of Canadians, and to make sure it doesn’t happen again, Rogers is committing $10 billion over three years for network upgrades and will spend $150 million on customer credits.
The decision comes after Rogers released an ad last week outlining what it is doing to win back the trust of Canadians.
In a separate court document filed Aug. 15 and made available to the public on Monday, the Competition Bureau said the proposed sale of Shaw-owned mobile operator Freedom Mobile to Videotron, a subsidiary of Quebecor, was not an “effective remedy” because it “fails to remove the substantial impairment and prevention of competition” that the marriage between Rogers and Shaw might cause.
Rogers intends to sell Freedom to Quebecor for $2.85 billion, hoping the move will assuage federal regulators’ concerns about its proposed takeover of Shaw.
Companies in this story: (TSX: RCI.B, TSX: SJR.B, TSX: QBR.B)