Twenty-five years alongside operators and regulators, from 2G to 5G.
This is where my practice began, and where it remains anchored.
Regulation is at once a constraint, a cost and a strategic weapon. My work is to make it the third.
Who obtains a licence. Who covers the areas no market will cover alone. Who bears the cost. How a regulator turns a policy into rules an operator can build on. These questions have shaped my professional life.
My training as an engineer, then in finance, allows me to read a radio plan, a cost model and a tender document with the same attention.
His very unique skills have proved instrumental to the longstanding growth of the company.
Licence applications, renewals and conversions to technology-neutral regimes. Spectrum assignment and auction procedures. The legal and economic assessment of fees and coverage obligations, measured against their real cost to the network.
Universal service tenders are where engineering, law and finance meet most directly: hundreds of lots, thousands of localities, cost caps, delivery deadlines, penalties, and a compensation mechanism that can turn a winning bid into a lasting loss.
I have acted as guarantor of the universal service bids of a leading North African mobile operator. In the last completed round, it was awarded the large majority of the lots.
The work combines a close reading of the tender and its compensation mechanism, the conduct of clarification requests before the regulator, the modelling of competitors and of their likely strategies, and a decision framework built for the executive committee. Management receives not a legal opinion, but a decision it can own.
Reference offers, national roaming, wholesale access, passive and active infrastructure sharing, and price disputes before regulators.
Market definition and significant market power, remedies, margin squeeze and discrimination, and the competition assessment of mergers and partnerships between operators.
Chairmanship of the drafting committee of a national Digital Code under a World Bank programme. Drafting of legislation on independent regulators for the telecom and media sectors and for constitutional bodies. Ongoing regulatory strategy for operators: consultations, sanctions proceedings, reform of the sector law.
Regulatory due diligence for investors and acquirers, structuring of infrastructure transactions and partnerships, and arbitration as an accredited arbitrator with the Paris Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
I work with executive committees as much as with legal departments. I build the economic models myself, so that every assumption can be explained and defended. And having worked on the drafting of rules, I have learned how regulators read a file and what they look for in it.