Privatisation Commission Blocks PTA From Approving Ufone’s Rebrand to e&

The Privatisation Commission has stepped in and told the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority not to approve Ufone’s proposed rebrand to e&, arguing the decision isn’t the regulator’s to make. According to the commission, the matter is a reserved issue between the two governments concerned and can only be settled at that level.

PTA’s chairman disclosed the directive while responding to media questions, confirming the commission had instructed the regulator to hold off on approving the brand change that followed the merger of Ufone and Telenor Pakistan. He said the matter involves commitments between the two governments, which places it outside what PTA alone can decide.

The intervention lands on top of an already unresolved process. Briefing the Senate Standing Committee on IT and Telecom around the same period, the Secretary IT and Telecom said Pakistan Telecom Mobile Limited, the legal entity behind Ufone, had approached PTA seeking permission to change the brand name to e&, and that the request remained under active consultation. He told the committee that the Competition Commission of Pakistan and PTA currently hold differing views on the proposal, that the government was examining the issue “from different aspects”, and that no final decision had been taken. Further consultations, he said, would be held before any conclusion was reached.

A Regulatory Question Becomes a Sovereign One

Until the Privatisation Commission’s intervention, the rebrand had been treated as a corporate and regulatory matter, one requiring alignment between PTA and the CCP, plus clearance from the SECP on the merged company’s board composition. The commission’s position resets that framing entirely.

By calling it a reserved matter between governments, the commission is pointing to the structure underneath the brand question rather than the brand itself. e& is the global identity of Emirates Telecommunications Group, a UAE state-owned company that holds a 26 percent stake in PTCL Group and exercises management control over it. The federal government of Pakistan, in turn, holds a 67 percent stake in the merged Ufone-Telenor entity. A rebrand that replaces an established Pakistani telecom identity with the UAE parent’s global brand touches both governments’ positions in the company, which is the basis for the commission’s claim that PTA cannot clear it unilaterally.

How the Rebrand Request Got Here

The path to this point has been long and uneven. Telenor Pakistan stopped existing as a separate company in late June, after the Islamabad High Court approved its amalgamation into PTML, transferring all its assets, liabilities and obligations into the surviving entity. PTCL Group confirmed soon after that the plan was to retire both the Ufone and Telenor names in favour of e&.

PTA gave the e& name conditional approval in a letter dated June 16, then reiterated in a follow-up letter on July 2 that PTML could not launch or advertise the new brand until the merger was legally complete and an SECP notification on the board’s composition was filed.

That approval triggered its own controversy before the current one. The Ufone board, which includes a sitting PML-N senator and two federal secretaries among its government-nominated directors, approved the e& name even though PTCL’s own board had earlier deferred the same proposal. The mismatch raised questions inside government about whether the Ufone board had the authority to approve a change of this scale on its own and about the optics of dropping “Pakistan” from the identity of a company the state holds a majority stake in. There was also a financial thread in the background: e& reportedly carries outstanding liabilities of roughly $800 million linked to its Pakistan operations, adding further scrutiny to how quickly the rebrand should proceed.

What the Senate Committee Was Told, and What Changes Now

The committee’s questions to the IT Secretary were narrower than what has now emerged. Lawmakers sought clarity on the regulatory process behind changing an established brand name, and the answer they received described a dispute confined to PTA and the CCP. The Privatisation Commission’s directive answers a different question than the one the committee asked, it says the regulatory process isn’t where this gets decided at all.

That shifts the decision to a different table. Instead of PTA weighing competition and branding concerns, or the Law Division ruling on whether the Ufone board overstepped its authority, the matter now sits with whatever mechanism governs formal engagement between the Pakistani and UAE governments , a process with no public timeline attached.

What This Means Going Forward

For Ufone’s more than 74 million combined subscribers, the practical result is unchanged for now; the brand stays Ufone. But the reasoning behind the delay has moved from procedural, missing paperwork, unresolved board authority, and disagreement between two regulators to structural: a rebrand tied to a foreign state-owned shareholder’s global identity inside a company the Pakistani state itself majority-owns isn’t something either government appears willing to let a telecom regulator settle on its own.

Until that government-to-government process concludes, the question the Senate committee raised, who ultimately signs off on retiring a two-decade-old Pakistani telecom brand, has effectively been answered: not PTA, and not on its own.