The Argentine government of Javier Milei He has just announced the preventive suspension of the sale of the subsidiary of Telefónica in the country, with which the company that presides Marc Murtra I was looking to achieve more than 1 billion euros of income. The sale was produced Telecombelonging to Clarín Groupand from the Executive of the South American nation they had already shown their reluctance to what they considered an operation that left Clarín in a position close to the monopoly.
Actually, the brake has been de facto the National Commission for the Defense of Competition in Argentina although, as is the case in Spain, it is an organ whose powers depend on the political environment. The entire surroundings of Javier Milei had shown his concern about the operation, with which Telefónica left another country in Latin America in which, according to the new directives launched by Marc Murtra, he is being disabled.
The truth is that both competition and the president of the president of Argentina have explained that, if the merger occurs, “it would imply a 61% concentration for the mobile telephone market; 69% for fixed telephony; And, with respect to the residential Internet service, in some areas of the country the concentration could reach 80%».
The Spanish telecommunications group had closed last February the sale of its Argentine subsidiary to the Telecom operator, participated by the Clarín Group, in an operation that had been estimated at 1,245 million dollars, about 1,145 million euros. President Milei was critical of this operation from the first moment, pointing out that it would be constituted, in Clarín, “a monopoly formed thanks to decades of state benefits received by said company, which would go against free competition and threaten the disinflationary process that is going through.”
Telecom is a company that belongs 40% to CVH, of the shareholders of the Clarín Group, in another 40% to Fintech and has 20% quoted in the stock market. The Argentine subsidiary of Telefónica, Telefónica de Argentina, was founded in 1990, after the privatization of the Spanish company.
