Undervalued equipment of Bankrupt telephone operator “Lacom” put up for auction.

A batch of equipment that once belonged to the landline telephone operator “LACOM” affiliate to “Orascom” Telecom has been put up for auction through the print media with a starting value estimated at 20 million Algerian Dinars although the equipment was subsidized by the Algerian authorities as part of the government’s program to support Arab investments in Algeria.

•  
• Because the sole unique interest of these pseudo- investors is to transfer hard currency abroad, “LACOM” has left the Algeria and leaving behind equipment estimated at 5 billion Algerian Dinars to be auctioned today after being seized by the Algerian authorities well under its real value.
•  
• The nature of the equipment has raised several questions as concerns the way it has been auctioned without prior permission from the authorities, because the batch contains transmission equipment, antennas and optic fibres requiring a permission from the tutelage sector to be auctioned.
•  
• Among the 500 sealed boxes put up for auction, some contain Central Processing Units that store data on several Algerian official institutions that subscribed to the operator in the past.
•  
• Big mystery surrounds the content of hundreds of sealed wooden boxes due to be auctioned without knowing what lies inside because they were stored in a big warehouse hired by LACOM but didn’t pay the rent, giving thus the right to the owner to seize them from the communication company.
•