MTN Nigeria has been hit with yet other multi-million naira fine for selling pre-registered SIM cards in that country between July and September this year.

According to the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) compliance monitoring and enforcement activities report for the third quarter in 2015, MTN Airtel, Globacom and Etisalat were fined a total of 40 million naira (US$200,391) for the offense.

MTN got the highest fine of N21.8m (US$109,213) followed by Globacom with N7.4m (US$37,000), then Etisalat N7m (US$35,000), and Airtel got the least fine of N3.8m (US$19,000).

The NCC said the “operators have since paid the above amounts”.

The sale of pre-registered SIM cards in the names of unidentified persons is also very commend on Ghana but Ghana's telecoms regular, National Communications Authority (NCA) is yet to act on that.

Additional fines on MTN Nigeria

Meanwhile, the NCC further fined MTN Nigeria another N80.4m (US$402,786) in the quarter “for failure to deactivate a total of 420 MSISDN that were incomplete and improperly registered”.

MSISDNs are telephone numbers linked to SIM cards and the penalty for this breach echoes that of the $5.2 billion fine MTN received for failing to disconnect five million unregistered SIMs.

The NCC said that MTN Nigeria has paid this N80.4m fine as well.

Meanwhile, the NCC, in its quarterly compliance monitoring and enforcement activities report, has also issued a “notice of intention to sanction” service providers in that country over other infringements such as data bundle depletions and mobile number portability violations.

The regulator, in the report, explained that MTN was found to comply with notifying subscribers via SMS about their data bundles being depleted before the due date.

However, MTN “failed to highlight the tariff rate for PAYG (pay-as-you-go) billing”, said the NCC. “In addition, data service is not suspended on depletion of the data bundle account even without an authorisation via an SMS from the subscriber."

In terms of mobile number portability, MTN is set to be slapped with “timer” fines regarding porting numbers. The NCC said it requires “validation and deactivation responses” regarding porting to each respectively have timelines of two hours and one hour.

The NCC then said that MTN incurred a “timer deactivation violation” regarding a corporate port request of over 109 lines belonging to Nigerian Breweries Plc.

Other African fines

MTN is not only experiencing problems in Nigeria when it comes to fines. Last week, Fin24 reported that MTN has been slapped with a Ugandan court order to pay US$662,000 in damages for anti-competitive behaviour.

This fine came amid a dispute between MTN and Uganda money transfer service EzeeMoney over a telephone lines and internet contract. MTN was accused of being anticompetitive by allegedly canceling the contract as MTN has its own mobile money service in that country.

MTN Uganda has however argued that it migrated EzeeMoney’s contract from prepaid to postpaid because of a lack of call volumes.

"MTN plans to appeal the court decision," a spokesperson of the company was quoted as saying.