Provide Dish with reasonable advance notice of network transition plans that could affect Boost customers.Give Dish the option to acquire old Sprint cell sites and retail stores that T-Mobile opts to decommission.Sell Sprint’s 800MHz spectrum to Dish three years after the closing of the merger.Not do anything anti-competitive toward Boost, like throttling or limiting access to new network technologies.Provide transition services for up to three years afterward to ensure Boost customers are transferred smoothly.Provide Dish’s wireless customers with access to the T-Mobile network for at least six years through a wholesale MVNO agreement while Dish builds its own network.

Sell Sprint’s prepaid business, including Boost Mobile, to Dish within 120 days after the close of the merger, and maintain Boost’s competitiveness before the divestiture.Sounds a little suspect, right? Surely a deal like that would include a lot of conditions, requirements, and oversight to make sure it would actually work.īut looking back, these were the major requirements imposed on T-Mobile to prop up Dish as a competitor: In other words, one wireless competitor was allowed to reduce competition only if it agreed to help set up another competitor in its place. Recognizing that this would indeed be a bad thing for US wireless customers (aka all of us), T-Mobile agreed to a set of conditions with the FCC’s blessing that would theoretically position Dish Network to fill the Sprint-shaped hole in our wireless landscape. Referring to the IRS’s list of ways deals can be exempted, he added, “any one of those will do.When T-Mobile acquired Sprint in April 2020, it brought our major wireless carrier choices from four down to three. “They’re well within the transition rule,” said New York-based tax consultant Robert Willens. Since then, the transaction has earned the blessing of the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department, but faces a pending lawsuit from 13 states and the District of Columbia seeking to kill the deal. T-Mobile and Sprint jointly announced their merger in April 2018. 10 proposal, deals entered into under a binding contract ordered by a court, such as in a bankruptcy case or announced publicly or in an SEC filing would be off the hook. The September proposal would eliminate a method of calculating built-in gains used to maximize the amount of losses companies can use after a merger. In the first five years after an acquisition, companies can raise the cap using so-called unrealized built-in gains, the difference between the market value of a target company’s assets and the value of the company’s investment in them at the time of the sale.

Losses generated prior to Sprint’s 2018 tax year will expire in up to 20 years, so a low cap could prevent the combined company from taking advantage of the losses in full. T-Mobile’s acquisition of Sprint is set to trigger an annual cap on the combined company’s use of those losses, equal to a small percentage of Sprint’s market value right before the deal. The IRS didn’t respond to a request for comment. “I think the IRS didn’t want to be the agency to make this deal fall through,” he said. T-Mobile’s success in dodging those rules could raise the amount of post-merger profits the company could shield from tax each year to more than $900 million from $458 million, Silverman wrote. In a November research note, Andrew Silverman, a Bloomberg Intelligence tax policy analyst, wrote that the September proposed rules could have reduced the portion of Sprint’s losses the combined company could use in the future to 43% from 85%. “It’s striking that T-Mobile seems to have gotten exactly what it wanted,” said Duke University School of Law professor Lawrence Zelenak. A T-Mobile spokesperson said the company believed it fit the exemption, but declined to comment further. The reversal followed a November letter from T-Mobile requesting that its merger with Sprint and other publicly announced transactions be subject to the old, more favorable rules. Those September proposed rules would have limited how much of Sprint’s $21 billion in losses T-Mobile could use after the merger to shrink its taxes. The agency earlier this month proposed exempting deals from previously issued proposed rules if they have been announced publicly or in Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The IRS allowed T-Mobile and Sprint to maximize a massive tax benefit in the wake of their planned merger-following T-Mobile’s call for the agency to do so-as the deal has stalled in court.

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