The Court of Administrative Litigation (TCA for its acronym in spanish) has ruled in favor of the Spanish company Telefónica (Movistar) due to a complaint filling against ANTEL, the State Telecommunication Company in Uruguay. ANTEL was forced to stop using a mobile phone frequency which has been used since 2005 in a non- legitimate way.
All the members of the Court agreed that URSEC gave no notice of the fact that other companies had interest for the same frequency so the way they proceeded was not considered right in terms of equality and free concurrency.
“Telefónica showed interest to obtain the assigned frequencies, requesting they were given by competitive procedures and not to ANTEL in a direct way” the TCA ruling said.
The Court stated that URSEC violated the current regulations and hurt the legitimate interests of other stakeholders.
The TCA understands that “the contested act is illegitimate to the extent that the administration stepped away from the procedure that had to be followed, this is the “competitive procedure” and in its place it wrongly adjusted its behavior to the “allocation of demand” system as if it was about frequencies which are not low or requested by other parties”.
