Amdocs and Bell Canada Joint Venture

On January 26, 2001, Israel’s Amdocs Limited (Admocs), the world leader in telecommunications customer care and billing solutions, entered into a C$200 million joint venture with Bell Canada to form Certen Inc. (Certen). Certen will provide billing solutions to Bell Canada and to other communications providers. Using Amdocs’ superior customer care and billing software, Certen will enable Bell Canada and others the ability to provide a single bill to customers for multiple communications services such as local, long distance, wireless, broadband and Internet.

The joint venture will be majority owned by Bell Canada and will be based in Montreal. Bell will transfer its current billing operations to Certen over a three-month period. After the initial start-up, Bell Canada and Amdocs plan to offer billing services to other firms inside and outside the BCE group.

Amdocs was represented by in-house counsel Yoram Arad and Michael Aaron of Amdocs, and by Dan Geva, Michael Haberman, Ronen Bezalel and May-Tal Gongolevsky of Meitar, Liquornik, Geva & Co., Ramat Gan, Israel. Canadian representation was provided by a team from Goodmans LLP, comprised of David Matlow, Neil Sternthal, Kari MacKay and Shevaun McGrath (corporate), Mitchell Sherman, Cyndee Todgham Cherniak and Jon Northup (tax), John Brookes and Rebecca Burrows (labour and employment), Jana Steele (pensions) and Michael Koch and Jennifer Bol (communications).

Acting for Bell Canada were Tim McGee, Richard Mannion, Pascale Chapdelaine and Genevieve Bich of Bell Canada, and a team from Ogilvy Renault comprised of Francis Legault, Mary Kelly, Michael McFadden, Daniel Paul, Michelle Setlakwe, Eric Stevens, Félix Duval and Adam Walsh (corporate) and Martin Rochette (pensions).