About

Jonas Olsson has served as senior legal counsel at Telia Company since 2000, and has therefore been involved in some of the company’s highest profile M&A deals and product launches in the last 18 years, as well as dealing with a number of legal and compliance challenges in this time. Olsson’s remit covers all business law within the telecommunications business, including national international public and private M&A, corporate finance and venture capital investments. Some highlights of his career at Telia include his leadership on the Telia-Sonera transaction, as he was the lawyer responsible for all of the merger filings in the EU, Baltic States, US and Russia, as well as negotiating with the merger task force at the EU Commission to achieve the merger’s successful clearance. He was also responsible for Telia’s divestment of its shares in Infonet at the NYSE to British Telecom, and for legal matters pertaining to the issuance of a corporate hybrid bond, one with a separate prospectus, in 2017. He identifies that through his career working in important, high-value M&A transactions that he has ‘learned the hard way that competition law is politics’ and continues to encounter related challenges as Telia deals with its Eurasian investments and divestments going forward. Thankfully for the Telia Company, the dominant Stockholm-headquartered telephone company and mobile network operator, Olsson can draw on a cornucopia of experience dealing with similar transactions on behalf of the business throughout his near two decades of outstanding service.