OTTAWA (Reuters) – A combined Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications Inc would be able to invest in the resiliency of telecom networks at a level that neither company can do alone, Rogers Chief Executive Tony Staffieri told lawmakers on Monday.
Staffieri made the case for approval of the proposed C$20 billion acquisition of Shaw while answering a parliamentary committee’s questions related to a major Rogers network outage that impacted millions of Canadians earlier in July.
“It allows us to … invest in the resiliency and redundancy of networks more than either one of us could do alone,” Staffieri said of the deal that has hit hurdles in an antitrust review by Canada’s competition watchdog.
(Reporting by Ismail Shakil in Ottawa and Divya Rajagopal in Toronto; Editing by Mark Potter)
