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Technology Stocks : Nextwave Telecom Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pcstel who wrote (628)	12/30/2001 12:31:31 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1088

PCSTEL, you are tempting me to dig into the details, but given that it took some years and much legalese to get the legal position to where it is today, I don't think I'll bother. I don't have investments in NextWave and am not thinking of doing so. Therefore, I'm not going to spend a lot of time deciding for myself what the legal outcome is likely to be. I think the negotiated position is likely a good representation of the legal position. Even if the forms were incorrectly completed, there is a legal outcome which NextWave presumably considered and valued, perhaps in conjunction with the then upcoming international telecommunications ownership deregulations. Perhaps they thought that the FCC auction was unconstitutional because women and minorities and small companies were given preference over other individuals and companies so checking 'no' was effectively a legal challenge. I dare say the FCC was capable of figuring out the legal position and deciding what to do. I agree that such rules were unfair and would not be surprised to find them unconstitutional so it was reasonable that NextWave pursue a bid even though the rules might have superficially excluded them. But what was their ownership at the time anyway? Did it in fact exceed the limits? To get the licence they had to comply, but did they have to comply to bid? I've been around long enough to know that government forms don't necessarily define what the law actually is. Even if they are deliberately giving false information, that might not necessarily mean there is a particular legal consequence. The intricacies of the arcane world of law is why companies pay lawyers a lot of money to sort stuff out. Thanks for hunting down the actual form conditions. I know there was some lack of compliance because before getting the licences, NextWave had to correct their ownership position [or something like that]. Mqurice