Libya will do all it can to protect its 75 percent stake in Zamtel, the fixed-line telecoms firm in Zambia, whose government announced plans last week to seize Libya’s stake in the firm, Libyan Foreign Minister Ashour bin Khayyal said Monday.<\/p>\n
“The Zambian government has taken a unilateral action by nationalizing this company,” Khayyal said, adding he had spoken to his Zambian counterpart about the issue at the African Union summit in the Ethiopian capital.<\/p>\n
Zambia dissolved the board of Zamtel and appointed a new acting CEO last Tuesday, a day after announcing plans to seize 75 percent of the firm from Libya’s LAP Green Networks.<\/p>\n
The previous Zambian government had sold the 75 percent stake to LAP Green Networks for $257 million in 2010.<\/p>\n
Libya made major investments in Africa during Muammar Gaddafi’s rule, some of them managed by the $65 billion Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) through a $5 billion fund known as Libyan African Investment Portfolio.<\/p>\n
LAP, a telecom company operating in six African countries, was one of these investments.<\/p>\n
Khayyal said Libya’s ruling National Transitional Council would review such investments. “We will keep what (investment) is successful, and we will review what is facing difficulty or is a failure,” he told Reuters on the sidelines of the summit.<\/p>\n
He said Libya would send a delegation to Zambia to discuss the Zamtel issue in one or two weeks.<\/p>\n
“Definitely this money is Libyan money, and owned by the Libyan people. We will exercise all our efforts to protect this money,” Khayyal said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Libya will do all it can to protect its 75 percent stake in Zamtel, the fixed-line telecoms firm in Zambia, whose government announced plans last week to seize Libya’s stake in the firm, Libyan Foreign Minister Ashour bin Khayyal said Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":4977,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[25,1174,1173,495,1175],"class_list":["post-4971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-telecommunications","tag-active","tag-africa","tag-libya","tag-telecoms","tag-zamtel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4971"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4989,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4971\/revisions\/4989"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}