Albania Court Upholds Fine for Mobile Operator

TIRANA, Jan 20, 2008 — A Tirana district court upheld a fine of 2 million euro on Albania Mobile Communication, AMC, by the Albania Competition Authority, ACA, for breaching market rules and unfair pricing methods.
ACA had imposed a fine equal to 2 per cent of 2005 revenues on AMC and Vodafone Albania, at the time the only operators in the market.
Albania’s Telecommunication Authority, ERT, will assign a new GSM license in the next few weeks.
“By Jan. 23, we will begin to accept offers”, said Ilir Shehu ERT head, claiming that “many foreign companies had already been interested to enter in the market”.
According to new tender procedures ERT will weight which company offers cheaper calls rates instead of the highest bidder for the contract.
Albania privatized its first mobile operator AMC back in May 2000 for 85.6 million USD and sold the second license on the following year for USD 38 million. The third license was assigned to the former state owned fixed line operator Albtelecom.
Albania currently has 2.3 million mobile phone subscribers, but penetration is still low compared to other East European countries. Albanians suffers also highest tariffs in the continent as a result of the high cost of interconnection between existing operators and lack of market liberalization.
Insiders in the marked insist that a new operator “will not bring cheaper calls”, because the core problem in the market is the interconnection tariffs that do not facilitate the entry of new competitors in the market.