“We are very pleased with this agreement and are determined to continue building Freedom’s assets,” Quebecor president and CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau said in a statement Friday. “Quebecor has shown that it is the best player to create real competition and disrupt the market.” The transaction is contingent on Rogers receiving final regulatory approvals for its planned $20 billion acquisition of Shaw, which was announced in March 2021. The road to regulatory approval became more treacherous for Rogers after Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell said his objections to the plan. warning that it would reduce competition in the telecommunications market, despite Rogers’ long-standing intention to divest Freedom Mobile. Rogers’ legal counsel strongly supported Boswell’s claims, saying in a June 3 submission to the Competition Tribunal that Boswell’s position “is absurd, contrary to both the financial and factual evidence presented to the Bureau and is not supported by the law”. The Competition Tribunal is currently scheduled to start a hearing on the matter on 7 November. Rogers also has to clear another regulatory hurdle: the planned acquisition of Shaw requires approval from Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, who previously said he would not allow the wholesale transfer of Shaw’s wireless assets to Rogers. The process was made more complicated for Rogers after a national grid outage knocked out service to its customers in early July. Afterwards, Champagne said the break would be “for sure [his] mind’ when weighing the value of selling Shaw. For its part, Canadian Broadcasting and Telecommunications Communications announced conditional approval of the transaction in March. Shaw investors have been persistently skeptical that the deal will go ahead as planned, as evidenced by the fact that its shares have never met Rogers’ $40.50 per share takeover offer since the takeover was announced last year.
