CRA Issues Notice of non-compliance to Ooredoo for International Service Providers Points of Presence in Qatar

The Communications Regulatory Authority (CRA) is mandated by the Telecommunications Law (Article 2 of Decree Law No. (34) of 2006) to identify and address anti-competitive practices in the telecommunications sector, ensuring the orderly development of the market. In order to assess the absence of any discriminatory or otherwise anti-competitive provisions, CRA asked Ooredoo to provide the text of its agreements with international service providers having points of presence in Qatar and making use of Ooredoo’s access network. This request is coherent with Article 62 of the Telecommunications Law and with Chapter 13 of the By-Laws (“Provision of information”) empowering CRA to request access to “information necessary for exercising its powers” in the “form, manner and time” specified. Notwithstanding various requests (January 3, 2016; February 15, 2016; March 7, 2016; March 28, 2016; April 17, 2016;) and notices sent on May 19, 2016 and on June 13, 2016, Ooredoo failed to comply with CRA’s request. On March 14, 2016 Ooredoo only delivered a subset of randomly selected contracts. These submissions were not complete agreements and pages from contracts and Annexes were found missing. As a consequence, CRA is unable to clearly exclude the possibility of exclusive or discriminatory provisions within Ooredoo’s agreements with international service providers or to assess the full compliance of the contracts with the Competition Policy. As a result, CRA has issued the attached notice of non-compliance to Ooredoo.