And one of the points brought up by the Chamber of Commerce was the lack of an independent valuation which leads to the question, what is Speednet truly worth? And what do their financials look like?
According to reports, Speednet only presented 1 year's worth of financials. But the PM explained why he believes additional reports are not necessary.
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"I think what, I really don't want to get into this back and forth because as you all know my family is also involved. But there are different ways in how you value companies and that has been explained. let me give you an example. We in the north, we bought pretty much all of the cable companies in the north. One of them that we bought was from Jules Vasquez, from his father. We paid $350,000, we did not ask for any financials, why? Because what we're buying is the cashflow. We knew that within the next four years, we'd be able to get back that money that we gave him. We know that it would cost us much to provide that service to their customers so do you know what Jules Vasquez gave us for $350,000? We don't even have a pencil, all we did, wait let me finish. I am making the point. You're missing the point."
Reporter:
"PM, that doesn't make sense."
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"It makes sense, that's the point, it makes sense. Because what we did, we took off his customers and put it on our system, but it didn't cost us much to service them because we already have the trucks running up and down in the area so the same thing applies to BTL and Speednet. I don't know how many financials or whatever they did but what I'm telling you, use that as an example. And in the presentation, the accounting firm, Moore, their headquarters from Brazil made the valuation. What they are saying is that the market is pretty much saturated and it will cost nothing, let's put it reverse, it would cost nothing for BTL to move over to Smart because it's the same service they're providing. So what BTL is attempting to do is to be able to get all that cashflow from all of those customers and then it will not cost them much to continue to provide service to people because they already have the trucks and towers, actually with the extra towers they're going to get, they'll be able to provide even better coverage to some of the areas for instance in Toledo that is not financially feasible to provide the service there. Because now you'll have towers, you could deploy towers in those areas."
