Globe Telecom Inc. challenged Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) to follow the lead of AT&T in responding to the US Department of Justice’s move to block its planned acquisition of T-Mobile USA.

“AT&T’s response to the US-DOJ suit assumes an even more refined and tasteful style when contrasted with PLDT’s own brusque reaction to oppositions filed by Globe and other players to its proposed acquisition of Digital Telecommunications Philippines Inc.,” said Yoly Crisanto, Globe Corporate Communications chief.

AT&T planned to acquire T-Mobile to create a merged company that will control almost 44 percent of the US wireless market. The US government moved to block the deal since the elimination of a rival will “remove a significant competitive force in the market” and result in higher prices, fewer choices and lower quality products.

In response to this, AT&T offered to surrender 25 percent of T-Mobile’s business, including spectrum and customers. This was an improvement of its earlier offer to divest 10 percent of T-Mobile assets.

“Faced with the same grounds raised by the US-DOJ and industry rivals to the AT&T-T-Mobile merger—namely, that the deal with Digitel would be detrimental to consumer welfare and fair competition—PLDT laughed off the claims as ‘irrelevant,’ as the oppositors were allegedly ‘not real parties in interest’ and had no legal standing to question the deal,” Crisanto said.

PLDT said its deal with Digitel was a purely private transaction between two parties; the National Telecommunications Commission’s (NTC) approval to it is merely ministerial.

Crisanto said PLDT also dismissed claims that the deal would hurt public interest, notwithstanding that it would automatically capture 73 percent of the cellular market, or almost double the “alarming” market share that would result from the AT&T-T-Mobile merger.

“PLDT also brushed off arguments that the deal would harm competition, despite its cornering of three out of the four blocks [or 75 percent] of 3G frequencies assigned by the NTC. In short, unlike its US counterpart, PLDT  offered the regulator and the public nothing,” she pointed out.

Crisanto chided Ray Espinosa, PLDT Legal and Regulatory Affairs head who, being a lawyer, “should be aware of the implications” that the Supreme Court ruling with Senior Justice Antonio Carpio as ponente, have made which makes the PLDT “in violation of its franchise for allowing foreigners to take control of the company reserved for Filipinos as per the Constitution.”

“Clearly, this is what made Sen. Joker P. Arroyo write that dissent that echoes the concerns made by the SC decision, which the senator termed as ‘lopsided’ with the 10-3 decision,” Crisanto said.

She added that, “Attorney Espinosa should not allow PLDT to continue to flagrantly violate the law with the cavalier dismissal of the complaints; it is not just patently illegal; it is also characteristically un-Filipino.”

PLDT, for its part, said, “We suggest that Globe refrains from lecturing PLDT on matters about which it has only superficial knowledge and instead focus on fixing its own affairs,” PLDT Spokesman Mon Isberto said when sought for comment.

In particular, Isberto said, Globe should stop using the 30MHz of valuable frequencies that it had acquired from broadcasting firm Altimax Broadcasting Co. “in a patently underhanded and unlawful manner.”

“These frequencies should be immediately returned to the NTC and bidded out to qualified telecom applicants,” Isberto said.

Last week PLDT subsidiary Smart Communications Inc. filed a complaint with the NTC against Altimax and Globe subsidiary Innove Communications Inc. for the illegal use of radio frequencies.

Smart noted that Altimax’s lease of its broadcast frequencies to Globe in 2009 for the latter’s use in providing wireless broadband services was patently illegal from the start since such arrangement was not authorized by Congress and the NTC. Worse, it added, the agreement was forged at a time when Altimax had already lost its legislative franchise due to non-operation.

“Altimax’s congressional franchise became void by operation of law a long time ago due to continuous non-operation for three years from the date it was granted by Congress,” Espinosa said.

After the PLDT-Digitel deal was submitted for resolution in end-July, Crisanto noted that while PLDT agreed to reset its internal deadline with Digitel for joint stockholder approval of the deal to August 26, it also warned that, if the deal were not approved by the NTC by then, it would cancel the deal and “call it a day.”

“For a player long used to keeping the whole country waiting for the landlines and the proverbial dial tone, and the whole industry waiting to be interconnected with it to this very day, in an era of deregulation, PLDT’s ultimatum was an irrational tantrum at best, and monopolistic arrogance at worst,” Crisanto said, citing that, “ironically, this is a case of the applicant threatening the regulator and the government.”

Thus, Crisanto said the NTC rightly declared that it was not bound by PLDT and Digitel’s own internal deadline as it was well within its statutory period within which to resolve the deal and was still carefully studying the same.

“In either case, the processes and the transcendental public interest issue involved in both agencies’ review would understandably take time and should not yield to PLDT’s efforts to railroad or subvert them,” she said.