AP, Rome
Telecom Italia SpA chairman Marco Tronchetti Provera resigned on Friday, Italian news agencies and state TV reported, amid mounting criticism over plans he announced earlier in the week to reorganize the company.
The development came two days after Italy's telecommunications watchdog summoned the company's management to discuss the plan, which would separate the company's mobile telephone unit, TIM.
The ANSA and Apcom news agencies reported that the board of the nation's largest telephone company had named Guido Rossi to succeed Tronchetti Provera, who is one of Italy's most influential industrialists.
But Dow Jones Newswires, citing unidentified sources, reported that the board, still meeting, was still mulling over the choice of Rossi, who was previously a senior executive at Telecom Italia.
The board meeting, in Milan, was unexpected.
Rossi, a former senator and former chief of the Italian stock market regulator, is a widely respected figure who was appointed earlier this year as extraordinary commissioner of the soccer federation to deal with the damage caused to Italy's lucrative world of soccer by match-fixing scandals.
A Telecom Italia spokesman did not immediately answer the phone.
On Monday, Tronchetti Provera unveiled plans to separate Telecom Italia's mobile and fixed-line assets, a move many observers read as a prelude to a sale of TIM as the executive sought to reinvent the company as a major player in the media sector.
Just two years earlier, Telecom Italia bought out minority investors in TIM in what was hailed as a strategy of convergence to bring all the company telecommunications operations under one roof.
The reorganization plan triggered a storm of criticism from politicians and union leaders.
Government ministers angrily suggested Tronchetti Provera was preparing to sell TIM to non-Italian investors. Telecom Italia unions announced a one-day strike at the end of this month to protest the organization and demanded the government block the restructuring.
Telecom said on Tuesday it had not received any offers for TIM.
A so-called "golden share" gives the government veto powers over corporate decisions over the former monopoly.
The EU on Wednesday said golden shares have no place in internal markets and said it would watch closely for any violations.
The spat turned into a furor on Wednesday when the office of Premier Minister Romano Prodi took the unusual step of publicly detailing private conversations over the past summer in which the prime minister and Tronchetti Provera discussed Telecom Italia's strategic plans.
The plans discussed in private appeared to run contrary to the strategic direction announced by Telecom Italia earlier in the week.
MARKET LEADERSHIP: Investors are flocking to Nvidia, drawn by the company’s long-term fundamntals, dominant position in the AI sector, and pricing and margin power Two years after Nvidia Corp made history by becoming the first chipmaker to achieve a US$1 trillion market capitalization, an even more remarkable milestone is within its grasp: becoming the first company to reach US$4 trillion. After the emergence of China’s DeepSeek (深度求索) sent the stock plunging earlier this year and stoked concerns that outlays on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure were set to slow, Nvidia shares have rallied back to a record. The company’s biggest customers remain full steam ahead on spending, much of which is flowing to its computing systems. Microsoft Corp, Meta Platforms Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc are
Luxury fashion powerhouse Prada SpA has acknowledged the ancient Indian roots of its new sandal design after the debut of the open-toe footwear sparked a furor among Indian artisans and politicians thousands of miles from the catwalk in Italy. Images from Prada’s fashion show in Milan last weekend showed models wearing leather sandals with a braided design that resembled handmade Kolhapuri slippers with designs dating back to the 12th century. A wave of criticism in the media and from lawmakers followed over the Italian brand’s lack of public acknowledgement of the Indian sandal design, which is named after a city in the
The US overtaking China as Taiwan’s top export destination could boost industrial development and wage growth, given the US is a high-income economy, an economist said yesterday. However, Taiwan still needs to diversify its export markets due to the unpredictability of US President Donald Trump’s administration, said Chiou Jiunn-rong (邱俊榮), an economics professor at National Central University. Taiwan’s exports soared to a record US$51.74 billion last month, driven by strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products and continued orders, with information and communication technology (ICT) and audio/video products leading all sectors. The US reclaimed its position as Taiwan’s top export market, accounting for
NEW MODELS: AI researchers are facing challenges in managing deceptive behaviors, with limited regulation and testing, as the race for advanced models intensifies The world’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models are exhibiting troubling new behaviors — lying, scheming and even threatening their creators to achieve their goals. In one particularly jarring example, under threat of being unplugged, Anthropic PBC’s latest creation, Claude 4, lashed back by blackmailing an engineer and threatening to reveal an extramarital affair. Meanwhile, ChatGPT creator OpenAI’s o1 tried to download itself onto external servers and denied it when caught red-handed. These episodes highlight a sobering reality: More than two years after ChatGPT shook the world, AI researchers still do not fully understand how their own creations work. Yet the race to
RSS