By Gaynor Dumat-ol Daleno, From Pacific Daily News

Indonesia’s largest telecommunications business no longer wants to buy the parent company of local phone, digital TV, cable and wireless communications provider GTA.

Both sides announced Thursday they’re mutually ending their agreement, which was announced early last year, for PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia, or Telkom, to buy GTA for an undisclosed sum.

“With this announcement, both parties will end the acquisition process, including the regulatory approval process with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. … and the Federal Communications Commission,” Telkom and GTA jointly announced.

Both sides had hoped to get the deal completed by early this year, but they didn’t get the FCC approval for their application process to be “streamlined,” or fast-tracked, FCC documents show.

Had the deal been pushed through, GTA would have been owned by a company whose parent is majority owned by the Republic of Indonesia, FCC filings show. The Indonesian government holds a 52.56 percent direct interest in PT Telkom, the FCC filings show.

The U.S. Department of Justice, with the concurrence of the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security, wrote to the FCC in June last year to “defer action,” on the proposed Telkom purchase of GTA.

The three federal entities were reviewing the proposed transaction “for any national security, law enforcement, and public safety issues,” but had not yet completed that effort, the U.S. Justice Department’s National Security Division wrote to the FCC in June last year.

The now-canceled joint application between GTA’s parent company and Telkom states the parties were trying to get an exemption from a federal law that caps foreign ownership of a telecommunications company in the United States to 25 percent.

The FCC can waive that limit, according to FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, who wrote in an FCC opinion last year that “the case to remove the shackles on foreign investment in U.S. companies is exceptionally strong.”

He cites that in South Korea and China, up to 49 percent of foreign ownership in telecommunications companies is allowed.

GTA has won bids to provide telecommunications services to the military in Guam.

Four years ago, GTA TeleGuam was awarded a five-year contract, which at the time was among one of the largest telecommunications contracts the Air Force’s 38th Cyberspace Engineering Group awarded because the agreement covers both the Navy and Air Force bases in Guam, according to BusinessWire.

AP TeleGuam Holdings, parent of GTA, also currently is owned by multinationals. Three private investment funds — AP Cayman Partners II, a Cayman Islands entity; Advantage Partners IV, a Japan entity; and Japan Ireland Investment Partners, an Ireland entity, were the three funds that were listed in FCC filings as the owner of GTA’s parent.

(Photo: PDN file)

For more on this story go to: http://www.guampdn.com/story/news/2016/06/06/indonesian-bid-buy-gta-canceled/85333816/