Canadian House to hold emergency meeting over Nortel's bankruptcy auction process

The Canadian House of Commons industry committee called for an emergency meeting scheduled for tomorrow to discuss the auction process that ended with Ericsson successfully walking off with Nortel's CDMA and LTE assets for $1.13 billion.

"It is expected that witnesses appear on behalf of Nortel, Ericsson, Research in Motion and the Department of Industry Canada," the committee said in the release announcing the meeting.

Research in Motion is apparently still miffed at the outcome. It has played the nationalism card by appealing to Canadian authorities that Nortel would be better off staying in Canadian hands. RIM was blocked from bidding for Nortel's assets because Nortel and its bankruptcy advisers told RIM that it could qualify to bid on Nortel's CDMA and LTE assets only if it agreed not to submit offers for any other Nortel assets for one year.

The company said it was prepared to pay around $1.1 billion for Nortel's wireless businesses. RIM said Nortel and its advisers were aware that RIM wanted to buy other Nortel assets as part of a plan to keep key portions of Nortel under Canadian ownership.

Now the Canadian government wants to know what transpired.

For more:
- see Unstrung [1]

Related articles:
RIM says its Nortel bid was blocked [2]
RIM running [3] out of Nortel auction options
Ericsson wins Nortel wireless assets for $1.1B [4]