Tunisie Telecom Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ahmed Mahjoub said the government had chosen private bank Banque d’Affaires de Tunisie (BAT) to advise on the sale of a 35 per cent stake in the telecoms provider.

“The authorities have picked BAT as the adviser for the 35 per cent share sell-off ... and that bank will start work in the next few days,” Mahjoub said in an interview late on Thursday. Citing preliminary results, Mahjoub also said TT posted a record profit of more than 1 billion dinars ($823 million) in 2004, up 23 per cent on 2003. He said 2005 net profit would be even higher.

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After he recalled the increase of trade exchanges between Turkey and the two Arab countries in 2003 and 2004, Erdogan noted that the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) signed with Morocco, then with Tunisia, are an important step in his country's relations with them. Erdogan deemed that the coming into force of the FTAs will give a new impetus to economic relations.

Turkey’s export to Tunisia is about 220 million US dollars, while its imports from this country stood around 98.1million US dollars. Turkish export to Morocco was 179.6 million US dollars in 2003, while the volume of imported goods reached 77million US dollars. Agreements on economic, scientific and technical cooperation, air transportation, maritime transportation, tourism and encouragement of investments were inked during Erdogan's visit to these countries.

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Work is well under way to construct a high-capacity fibre optic submarine cable network, as part of the Sea-Me-We 4 submarine optical network linking Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Western Europe. Fujitsu Limited, together with its co-contractor Alcatel, were selected by the Sea-Me-We 4 consortia to deliver the network as a turn-key project.  The new terabit cable system will support more than 32 times the initial transmission capacity of the previous Sea-Me-We 3 network.  The new cable system is over 20,000-km long, a length equivalent to half the Earth's circumference, and will link 14 countries from France to Singapore via Italy, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia with 16 landing points. The system is commissioned for start-up by July 2005.

The network caters to the demand among consortia countries for high-capacity transmission systems, which is expected to grow sharply over the next few years. The speedy and timely implementation of the Sea-Me-We 4 cable network is considered essential to meeting this rise in demand.

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