Kenya’s leading telecommunications company, Safaricom, has announced that it is no longer in the pursuit to acquire yuMobile’s assets, saying that it had already made the decision to withdraw its bid, long before the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) set the acquisition rules.

While announcing his company’s decision, Safaricom’s chief executive officer Bob Collymore said that a requirement to have it open up its M-Pesa agent network had raised a lot of concern for the telco.

“I said last week and still maintain that Safaricom is no longer interested in this deal. The decision we must make is whether to come back to it or not,” said Collymore.

Early last week, Safaricom’s director of corporate affairs, Nzioka Waita, had indicated that the company was having second thoughts on the yuMobile infrastructure acquisition, in what he termed as ‘change in the fundamentals of the deal’ owing to the fact that the CCK had taken longer than expected to approve the acquisition.

Safaricom, Airtel and yuMobile have already held a meeting this week to discuss the requirements set by the CCK, and have already raised several contentious issues that they seek to have clarified by the communications regulator.

Safaricom is seeking to clarify why the CCK had directed it to open up its M-Pesa agency network, even though a petition by its rivals on the matter is still awaiting a court ruling.

Airtel, on the other hand, is required to pay a total of $5.4 million fee to the CCK, and is seeking to clarify whether it will be required to pay the amount upfront, or wait for its licence renewal date coming up in January 2015.

Airtel; however, is yet to announce its official position over the proposed deal, with the renewed CCK conditions in place.