Hurmuud Telecommunications has denied any links with the terrorist grop Al-Shabab and instead said they are among the major victims.
The telco also denied aiding the militants to attacks Kenya’s masts in exchange for protection.
Hormuud Telecom said it has been losing staff and property it owns and has not aided the group.
Reacting to a report by the UN Panel of Experts on Somalia, Hormuud argued it was committed to supporting the Mogadishu authorities and the African Union Mission in Somalia to defeat terrorism, for the better of communities.
The company’s spokesman, Mr Abdulahi Mohamud, said Hormuud has usually been caught in the crossfire of government forces and the Al-Shabaab.
Mr Mohamud said Hormuud Telecom is a business that follows international standards of ethics. He added that the company has lost 59 staff since 2009, often caught in the middle as government and Amisom forces fight against terrorists.
The Panel of Experts, initially known as the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea, said in the report that Hormuud had several times been caught in the middle of factions of Al-Shabaab as they extort companies to raise revenues.
In one fight in November 2018, a faction allied to ISIL attacked and killed 11 employees of the company in Mogadishu reportedly because they declined to pay ‘protection’ fees.
The report also claimed that, under forced circumstances, Hormuud had cooperated with the Al-Shabaab to organise revenge attacks on the Kenya Defence Forces, by targeting communication masts owned by Safaricom in the north-eastern region, to curtain intelligence gathering by Kenyan security agencies.
KDF has routinely denied engaging in scorch-earth policy against Hormuud.
The company on the other hand said it was open for audit to determine its operations.
Hormuud, which operates in central and southern Somalia, is the largest telecom with services in mobile telephony, mobile money, Internet and other key sectors providing what it calls efficient and low-cost services.
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