Uganda has deported a French and a Rwandan executive from MTN, accusing them of planning to compromise national security, Reuters reported, citing the police. MTN Uganda said its chief marketing officer Olivier Prentout was detained at Entebbe airport on 19 January after returning from a business trip, then sent back to France. The company said its head of sales and distribution, Annie Bilenge Tabura, was arrested by security personnel as she arrived at its headquarters in Kampala on 21 January, then deported to Rwanda.
The company did not comment directly on the police accusation but said the company and all its employees are committed to respecting and operating within Ugandan laws. There was no immediate statement from either executive. Police said on Twitter that the pair were deported “over their engagements in acts which compromise national security”. It did not go into further details on the charges. In 2018, MTN Uganda said government security personnel had raided its data centre and disconnected four of its servers.
MTN Uganda has more than 10 million subscribers and competes chiefly with India’s Bharti Airtel. MTN’s twenty-year licence expired in October 2018. The firm applied for a ten-year extension and the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) gave it an interim renewal lasting six-days, pending resolution of a number of unspecified issues before a final licence is issued. Ugandan authorities have said that MTN has agreed to list its shares on Uganda’s local bourse as a condition of renewing its licence, though the firm itself is yet to confirm this.
In November 2018, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni criticised the country’s telecom regulator after it slashed MTN Uganda’s fee for renewing its telecoms licence. The UCC ultimately decided to charge MTN Uganda USD 58 million to renew its licence for ten years, instead of the USD 100 million originally set for the renewal. Museveni said in a letter he was “astonished” by UCC’s decision to cut the charge.
