§ 22.945 - Interests in multiple applications.

This section governs interests in applicants with mutually exclusive applications for a new cellular system. For the purposes of this section, “interest in an application” means interest in the applicant.

(a) General. Except as otherwise provided in this section, parties must not have any interest, direct or indirect, in more than one application for authority to operate a new cellular system in the same cellular market.

(b) Abutting CGSAs. Licensees of existing systems whose cellular geographic service area (CGSA) abuts a proposed CGSA may each file one application that is mutually exclusive with the applications of other such licensees, even though they share common owners, provided that such licensees do not thereby acquire a simultaneous interest in applications for both channel blocks in any geographical area.

(c) Publicly traded corporate applicants. Parties must not have any interest, direct or indirect, in more than one mutually exclusive initial application for which the applicant is a publicly traded corporation, except that ownership interests of less than 5% are not considered. Ownership and other interests in applicants are attributed to their holder and deemed cognizable as set forth below.

(1) Passive investors. Investment companies, as defined in 15 U.S.C. 80a-3, insurance companies and banks holding stock through their trust departments in trust accounts are deemed to have a cognizable interest in a publicly traded cellular applicant only if they hold 10% or more of the stock of the applicant. This provision applies only if an applicant in which such parties hold an interest certifies in its application that no such party has exerted or attempted to exert any influence or control over the officers of the applicant.

(2) Multiplier. Attribution of ownership interests in a publicly traded cellular applicant that are held indirectly by any party through one or more intervening corporations will be determined by successive multiplication of the ownership percentages for each link in the vertical ownership chain and application of the relevant attribution benchmark to the resulting product, except that wherever the ownership percentage for any link in the chain exceeds 50 percent, it is not included in the multiplication.