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…

Vodafone said it was in talks to sell its Italian business to Swisscom in a deal that would value the unit at €8bn, as chief executive Margherita Della Valle continues her attempts to simplify the telecoms group. The London-listed company said on Wednesday that a sale to Swisscom would deliver “the best combination of value creation, upfront cash proceeds and transaction certainty for Vodafone shareholders”. After taking over, Della Valle set out her objective to pursue deals in markets where…

The first trial in the English courts stemming from a wave of class action antitrust lawsuits starts on Monday, as telecoms operator BT faces a £1.3bn claim that it overcharged about 3mn landline customers. Harbour Litigation Funding is financing a case fronted by former Ofcom official Justin Le Patourel that alleges the telecoms group abused a dominant market position to charge “excessive” prices for landline customers, many of them elderly. BT is contesting the allegations. The case is being…

The UK competition regulator has launched a formal probe into the planned merger of Vodafone’s domestic operations with CK Hutchison’s Three UK, which is expected to create Britain’s largest mobile operator. On Friday, the Competition & Markets Authority said it was formally assessing the tie-up, having initially sought views from the market on whether the blockbuster deal would harm competition in October last year. The start of the probe comes two days after the government said that a stake…

UK councils have called on the government and companies to help pay for millions of pounds of upgrades to equipment for their most vulnerable residents ahead of the telecoms industry’s transition to a digital telephone system. Local government officials said the migration away from analogue products had not been well communicated, and that the high costs for social care users and social housing were hitting other services at a time of severe budget pressures. The public switched telephone netw…

BT will this month launch its first roadside electric vehicle charging station, which will be connected to a street cabinet traditionally used for telecoms cables, as the FTSE 100 company seeks to tackle the UK’s charger shortage. The telecoms group is exploring the potential to upgrade as many as 60,000 cabinets if a pilot is successful, with its start-up and digital incubation arm Etc powering up its first EV charging unit in East Lothian, Scotland, as part of a UK-wide trial. While Prime Mi…

Mobile users in Britain were hit by the slowest average 5G download speeds of any G7 country in 2023, according to data, despite ministers’ emphasis on the benefits of the technology to economic growth. UK mobile users had an average 5G download speed of 118.2 megabits per second between August 1 and October 29 2023, down 13 per cent from 136.5 mbps in the same period in 2022, according to a study by research company Opensignal shared with the Financial Times. That was significantly slower tha…

Telefónica shares jumped almost 6 per cent on Wednesday after Spain said it would buy up to 10 per cent of the telecoms group in response to a move by Saudi Arabia’s STC Group to acquire a similar size holding. Spain’s decision raises the stakes in the battle for influence at Telefónica, a national champion with businesses in security and defence. It has been targeted by STC — majority-owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — as the group seeks to expand its investments in Europe. After…

The biggest UK mobile phone operators could face total damages of £3.3bn following class-action claims that they allegedly charged 5mn existing customers “loyalty penalties” over a 16-year period. Claimant lawyers say they filed court documents at the Competition Appeals Tribunal against Vodafone, EE, Three UK and O2 last week. The claims accuse the phone companies of overcharging on as many as 28.2mn contracts by not reducing the amount customers had to pay after their minimum terms expired, d…

UK telecoms group reports 1.1% uptick in revenue in its biggest market

Largest shareholder ‘deeply regrets’ acceptance of private equity’s firm offer of up to €22bn for fixed-line network