Nortel creditors object to sale

Creditors and suppliers of bankrupt Nortel Networks have filed objections to Nokia Siemens Networks' $650 million bid for most of Nortel's wireless assets.

One of the creditors, MatlinPatterson, is complaining that the current bidding process may freeze out other potential bidders. Nokia Siemens has said it wants to complete the deal by the third quarter of this year.

"These restrictions serve only to permit Nokia-Siemens to effectively lock down these valuable core assets," MatlinPatterson said in a U.S. court filing. The creditor is seeking a two-week extension of the sale process, and is arguing that more value could potentially be squeezed out of Nortel.

In other Nortel news, Light Reading is reporting that the company did not agree to sell off all of its LTE assets and is actually holding onto some key LTE patents. The deal includes the stipulation that Nokia Siemens will license "certain intellectual property necessary for the manufacture of the products and the provision of services."

Nokia Siemens also made some progress of its own on the LTE front, winning a $352 million loan from the European Investment Bank to develop its multimode radio access network technology, which allows service providers to run GSM and LTE from a single base station.

For more:
- see this Reuters article
- see this Dow Jones Newswires article (sub. req.)
- see this Light Reading article

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