The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Finance Corporation will fund Ukraine’s newly merged telecoms company with $435 million, the lenders said on Thursday. <\/p>\n
The project is the largest direct foreign investment of the war unleashed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. <\/p>\n
A consortium of investors led by French billionaire Xavier Niel announced last month the completion of a transaction to acquire and merge Ukraine’s Lifecell mobile operator with the country’s Datagroup-Volia service provider. <\/p>\n
The EBRD and IFC will each provide $217.5 million to help finance the acquisition, Holger Muent, EBRD’s director of telecommunications, media and technology, told Reuters. <\/p>\n
“That is the game changer,” he said in an interview online, confirming earlier plans to make the investment. <\/p>\n
“It will create the second-largest operator of that kind in the country and that leads to higher speed, better coverage, lower energy consumption for the network, and more redundancy in the network as well.” <\/p>\n
Ukraine’s largest telecoms provider is Kyivstar, which is owned by the Amsterdam-listed VEON. <\/p>\n
The consortium is led by NJJ, a French telecoms investment holding company owned by Niel. NJJ has partnered with Horizon Capital, a leading Ukraine-based private equity fund, and Mykhailo Shelemba, former CEO of Datagroup-Volia, now CEO of the newly merged group.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Finance Corporation will fund Ukraine’s newly merged telecoms company with $435 million, the lenders said on Thursday. The project is the largest direct foreign investment of the war unleashed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. A consortium of investors led by French billionaire Xavier Niel announced last month the completion of a transaction to acquire and merge Ukraine’s Lifecell mobile operator with the country’s Datagroup-Volia service provider. The EBRD and IFC will each provide $217.5 million to help finance the acquisition, Holger Muent, EBRD’s director of telecommunications, media […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-865081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telecom"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=865081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865081\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=865081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=865081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=865081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}