Yasemin Craggs Mersinoglu

New data over recent years reveal blindings and amputations, prompting calls for more focus on safety for vulnerable staff

Research highlights impact of poor network performance on consumers

Financial software provider announces plan for £400mn share buyback and raises dividend

Force used the technology 117 times from January to August, up from 32 between 2020 and 2023

Department for Science, Innovation and Technology wants to know where barriers ‘can be mitigated or removed’

AT&T suffered a vast cyber security breach earlier this year, with hackers accessing the call and text message information of 110mn of the US telecoms company’s customers. Over 11 days in April, “threat actors” accessed and copied records of customer calls and texts from a period of several months in 2022 as well as on January 2 2023, AT&T said in a regulatory filing on Friday. The compromised data included files related to “nearly all” of its cellular customers, customers of mobile virtual ne…

Auditors were unable to sign off the accounts of telecoms company Lycamobile UK, putting further pressure on the former Conservative party donor, which is also embroiled in a dispute with HM Revenue & Customs. PKF Littlejohn said it had “not been able to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence to provide a basis for an audit opinion” for the company’s financial statements for the year ended December 31 2022, according to filings from Companies House, including over the recoverability of a…

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has taken a 3 per cent stake in BT after new chief executive Allison Kirkby unveiled her plans to turn around the UK telecoms group at its annual results last month.The FTSE 100 company on Wednesday announced the position — worth about £400mn — which was taken by three companies controlled by the family of the tycoon. Slim’s motive is unclear, but he joins other high-profile telecoms shareholders, including billionaire Patrick Drahi’s Altice and German group Deut…

The government has reversed its decision to raise the income and asset thresholds for promotions of potentially risky investments to high-net worth individuals after a backlash from investors and technology companies. The Treasury on Wednesday announced in its Budget statement that it would legislate to reinstate previous eligibility criteria that had been tightened earlier this year. Executives, tech groups and start-up investors had campaigned against the decision to increase the thresholds…

Company insiders joke that Margherita Della Valle’s “blood runs Vodafone red”. Such is the 58-year-old’s passion for the company where she has spent just over half of her life. But the group’s Italian chief executive is now having to do some bloodletting of her own. She plans to sell Vodafone Italia as part of a sweeping restructuring to streamline company operations that will see 11,000 employees culled. The potential deal to offload its Italian business to Swisscom — announced this week — is…