Morales nationalizes Bolivian telecom, foreign gas companies

Morales said his government would take "absolute control from this moment on" of the former state telephone company, in which Telecom Italia SpA owns a 50 percent share.

Morales announced plans to buy back Entel last year, but negotiations with Telecom Italia have dragged out. Following Thursday's decree, Bolivian police were dispatched to stand guard outside Entel offices in La Paz and the eastern city of Santa Cruz.

"Basic services call them energy, water or communications cannot be in the hands of private business. They're public services," Morales told a crowd outside his presidential palace during celebrations of international workers' day.

Public Works Minister Oscar Coca said that the Bolivian government would later name the price it intended to pay for Telecom Italia for their shares, and that the transfer would take place within 60 days.

Morales also announced the return to state control of four former pieces of Bolivia's state energy company YPFB, which was privatized during the 1990s. He had announced plans for that move when he declared the nationalization of Bolivia's oil and gas sector on May Day 2006.

The president said he has signed an agreement to purchase a majority share in the gas production company Andina from Spanish company Repsol YPF. Terms of the sale were not immediately released.

Hydrocarbons Minister Carlos Villegas said the deal gives YPFB, long a bit player in its own country, an active role in Bolivia's two largest gas fields, San Alberto and San Antonio.

Morales commended Repsol as the "symbol of a business that negotiates" while announcing the nationalization of three other foreign-owned energy companies that failed to work out a deal before his April 30 deadline.

The government will purchase majority shares in the gas production company Chaco, controlled by British Petroleum, and the pipeline company Transredes, controlled by the Houston-based Ashmore Energy International. But it will buy all of the German-Peruvian owned distribution company CLBH, Villegas said.