It started in May this year when Bharti and MTN publicly announced that the two firms were engaged in talks to merge the entities. This marked the second instance when the two firms started work towards a possible merger.

Last year talks between the two companies failed as Bharti’s Sunil Mittal said, “MTN has now presented a completely different structure, from what was agreed. This new structure envisages Bharti Airtel becoming a subsidiary of MTN and exchange of majority shares of Bharti Airtel held by the Bharti family and Singtel, in exchange for a controlling stake in MTN. Bharti believes that this convoluted way of getting an indirect control of the combined entity would have compromised the minority shareholders of Bharti Airtel and also would not capture the synergies of a combined entity,” on May 25, 2008. Incidentally the two firms entered into talks exactly a year after this on May 25, 2009.

Having already experienced rough grounds in its talks with MTN, it was expected that Bharti would never ever engage itself with MTN. And even when this year’s announcement was made that the company was actually doing so again, it was expected that Bharti certainly would have taken care of the apprehensions before actually making public the entering of talks.

There has been couple of extensions of the deadline for talks already and the duo face another deadline on September 30, 2009.

If the two decide to extend the talks this time around, it will put a big question mark on the foresight of the two companies before entering into talks.

The issue of dual listing which is considered to be the latest hurdle in the progress of talks emerged only after the talks started. It was required by both the firms to precisely identify potential hurdles before entering into talks.

Indian government as well as agencies are projecting to do their best possible bit to facilitate the deal. Even if they manage to do so it will put pressure on the government to facilitate other deals as well in future which require the government to be flexible in allowing departure from laid down regulations.

For shareholders of Bharti the past couple of months have only resulted in apprehensions mounting on the deal. The uncertainty is only adding to their woes. One hopes the next couple of days bring some good news for such shareholders.