This became known on Sunday, when a secret meeting was held to finalise details of the deal prior to its announcement yesterday.

Those present at the meeting included Wichit Surapongchai, president of Siam Commercial Bank, eminent tax-law expert Suvarn Valaisathien, representing the Shinawatra and Damapong families, and Thanachart Bank president Supadet Poonpipat, who was involved on the buyers’ side.

Also there to represent Temasek were officials of Goldman Sachs, although the financial firm had denied any involvement in the deal.

But the most important man there must have been Shin Corp Plc CEO Boonklee Plangsiri, who had denied the planned takeover all along.

Indeed, the deal started taking shape late last year when the Shinawatra and Damapong families first contacted Singapore Telecommunications about a share sale.

A source at Shin said the families proposed to sell the shares at Bt55, but SingTel chairman Chumpol Na Lamliang commented the price was too high and asked them to reduce it to Bt30 per share.

“That’s why the talks were aborted,” the source added.

The families later assigned Boonklee as their representative to propose the deal to the Singapore’s state investment arm, Temasek, which controls SingTel, the source said.

Earlier, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, Singapore Telecom, and China Mobile were among the companies speculated to be possible buyers.

“Temasek was interested and the relevant parties and the families went to Singapore on January 6 this year to sign a letter of intent to enable it to conduct the due diligence on the deal,” the source said.

He added the letter of intent required the families and Temasek to officially conclude the deal within a month.

“The reason for the family to exit the telecom empire is that Thaksin wants to end the criticism of conflict of interest against him and his family. Thaksin first considered exiting the telecom empire two years ago, but the situation was unfavourable at that time,” the source said.

S Iswaran, Temasek’s managing director for investment, said both the Shinawatra and Damapong families and Temasek had been in extensive talks on the deal over the past six weeks.

The negotiations were not smooth. Both parties took a long time to agree on the sale price, Shin’s holdings in other subsidiaries, the reorganisation of Shin businesses after the transaction and the concern if the families would have to pay taxes after the share sales.

Suvarn was in the deal to solve this. There was a rumour that the five members of the families who held the shares would not have to pay a single satang in taxes.

Once the tax issue was resolved, so were the others. Temasek made it clear it was interested only in Advanced Info Service Plc. “They also discussed about how to make people feel that Shin was still a Thai company after the deal,” the source added.

He said the families and Temasek had initially planned to announce the deal last Monday but put it off until yesterday because the Temasek-led group had not yet finalised the method of payment for the shares.

Business Reporters
The Nation