NTL executives will reject charges that they tried to rig the sale of Cablelink when they appear in the High Court this morning. The court will also hear demands from Esat Telecom that it should be allowed to buy the State-owned cable company at the price it bid last Friday, £410 million (€521 million).
Meanwhile, another bidder, UPC, has said the concentration on price in the buying process was "flawed", and that the sale should start from scratch with a focus on the consumer.
US company NTL said in a statement yesterday that Esat's case was "without merit", and that NTL had done nothing wrong in how it approached the bidding. "Throughout the sales process for Cablelink, Ireland's largest cable provider, we have acted with complete propriety."
Esat will argue that NM Rothschild - the London-based consultants running the sale on behalf of Telecom Eireann and RTE - should have awarded the sale to its consortium last Friday, because it made the highest cash bid for the company.
According to Esat, it bid £410 million for Cablelink, while NTL failed to name a price, saying instead that it would pay 15 per cent more than the highest bidder. Such a move - known as a referral bid - should have been ruled out by Rothschild and the company awarded to the highest cash bidder, Esat contends.
But much attention will focus on the allegation made by Esat's chief executive, Mr Denis O'Brien - when he secured an interim injunction halting the sale process on Wednesday - that NTL tried to rig the bidding for Cablelink. Fixing such a process would contravene competition law.
According to Mr O'Brien, he and another Esat executive were approached by NTL's chief operating officer, Mr John Gregg, and asked to conspire to drive down the price.
"Mr Gregg said that by involving all the bidders in a consortium, we would be in a position to fix the bid price at a greatly reduced figure," Mr O'Brien said in his affidavit on Wednesday night.
Another of the bidders, TCI, said yesterday it had been approached by NTL, but only with a view to selling Princes Holdings, the Limerick-based cable company it already controls. "However, agreement could not be reached between the two sides," a spokesman said.
In its statement, UPC said it had not colluded with anyone to fix the price of Cablelink, but that it nonetheless believed the bidding process for Cablelink was fundamentally flawed.
