UK phone calls threatened

Telephone calls from Zimbabwe to Britain could be barred because the state-run Posts and Telecommunications Corporation (PTC) has failed to service its US $16.2 million debt to British Telecom (BT), the ‘Financial Gazette’ reported on Thursday. Stewart Jakarasi, the acting chief executive of the PTC, blamed Zimbabwe’s foreign currency shortages for the PTC’s failure to make its payments to BT since the beginning of the year. “The British have not yet said what action they will take, but we suspect they can pull out the plug on us at anytime,” a PTC official said, preferring not to be named. Other PTC sources said the huge debt to BT arose from the unequal exchange of telecommunications traffic between the two countries. The PTC’s problems were exacerbated by the continued depreciation of the Zimbabwe dollar against the country’s major trading partners. Efforts mooted in January to initiate a 90-day recovery plan and to raise millions of US dollars from the market to pay off part of the domestic debt have failed. The failure has throw the whole plan into chaos as financial institutions increasingly refuse to lend the corporation any more money.