Euronews: Vodafone Sues T Italia for $1.3B

Vodafone Group plc, Telecom Italia SpA, Kabel Deutschland GmbH and Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. start the week in today's trawl of the EMEA headlines.

Vodafone is suing Telecom Italia for $1.3 billion, accusing it of abusing its dominant position in the Italian market, reports Bloomberg. This is all Telecom Italian needs: Last week it reported a disastrous set of first-half financials which showed that it was more or less being propped up by its Latin American operations. Elsewhere on the Vodafone front, Reuters reports that Kabel Deutschland's management board has formally recommended the mobile giant's €7.7 billion ($10.2 billion) bid for control of the company, while Vodafone's Dutch unit has been busy launching 4G in four cities, namely Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. (See Euronews: Vodafone Strikes €7.7B Kabel Deal.)

Huawei is setting up a finance team in London to support the vendor's relationship with global banks and other financial institutions, according to a report in the Financial Times (subscription required). (See Huawei Juggernaut Rolls On.)

ST-Ericsson has completed its restructuring process or, to put it another way, it's successfully self-dismembered. Around 1,800 employees were transferred from ST-Ericsson to Ericsson AB as part of the deal, while around 1,000 moved from the now-defunct joint venture to STMicroelectronics NV. Products-wise, Ericsson will take on the design, development and sales of the LTE multimode thin modem products, while ST will take on the remaining ST-Ericsson offerings as well as certain assembly and test facilities. (See Euronews: ST-Ericsson Does the Splits.)

European telcos are among those that have been specifically identified as willing participants in the U.K. "data spying" scandal, which centers on the activities of the British intelligence-gathering body, GCHQ. According to this report in The Guardian, a leaked internal document revealed that various codenames had been given to the companies that were giving GCHQ access to metadata carried on subsea cables: BT Group plc, for instance, was dubbed "Remedy," while Vodafone was known as "Gerontic." Go figure. (See British Spooks Tap the Global Net.)

Bezeq, The Israel Telecommunications Corp. Ltd. saw second-quarter net profits rise 14 percent year-on-year to 473 million shekels ($133 million), reports Reuters. The rise in profits from Internet services outweighed the decline in its mobile unit, Pelephone Communications Ltd.

BT has bagged two more FTTx contracts under the BDUK (Broadband Delivery UK) program, which sees the operator, the government and the local authority all put in some money to improve the local infrastructure. The latest wins involve the respective county councils of Oxfordshire and Worcestershire, the former deal worth £25 million ($38.3 million) and the latter £20 million ($30.6 million).

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading