A consortium led by businessman Brendan Murtagh is likely to pay off Smart Telecom's outstanding liabilities with Eircom today, clearing the way for him to lead a refinancing of the troubled telco.
As ComReg commissioner John Doherty defended the industry regulator's stewardship of a crisis which saw 45,000 of Smart's fixed-line customers cut off without warning on Monday, Smart Telecom and Eircom were said to have struck a deal on a new interconnection agreement.
Mr Murtagh and his team, whose members have not yet been named, are believed likely to refinance Smart by €10-€15 million, a sum that will include €2.3 million to help settle the company's €4.3 million debt with Eircom.
The remaining €2 million will be drawn down by Eircom on a Smart Telecom bond.
While formal notification of the deal has been awaited for days, informed sources said an announcement today was likely. It is believed that Mr Murtagh proposes to delist Smart from the Alternative Investment Market, where its shares were suspended on Tuesday morning, and offer only a broadband service in the future.
Mr Doherty said yesterday that all Smart customers would have a partial reconnection restored by noon today.
"I think it is bad that three days after the event, Smart Telecom has still not put any material out for their own customers," he said.
ComReg was working with Minister for Communications Noel Dempsey to establish new protocols under which a network operator such as Eircom would be obliged to give 24 hours notice that it proposed to terminate a service. Such protocols would have to be set out in legislation, he said.
ComReg had asked Eircom to provide such notice in advance of the cut-off, but the first the regulator knew of the termination was just before it took effect.
"Regardless of legality, the fact that consumers should be stranded like that really is not the way we should be going forward," said Mr Doherty.
However, he rejected the suggestion that ComReg should have taken action to warn consumers but said it was unacceptable in a modern economy that consumers were left without a service. "I think we were surprised that it actually came to pass," he said.
"The regulator couldn't take pre-emptive action as that might in itself have pre-empted a crisis that would not otherwise have happened."
