Euronews: TeliaSonera CEO Quits

TeliaSonera AB, BT Group plc and Telefónica SA proffer something for the weekend in today's trawl through the EMEA headlines.

The CEO of TeliaSonera, Lars Nyberg, has quit in the wake of the investigation into the operator's affairs in Uzbekistan. In a statement, Nyberg noted that while an investigation had "not found anything to support the allegations that TeliaSonera committed bribery or participated in money laundering," the carrier was criticized for not doing enough due diligence into its local partner and that, as a result, he no longer had the full support of the TeliaSonera board. Nyberg was appointed as CEO in 2007. The board of directors has appointed Per-Arne Blomquist as acting president and CEO. (See TeliaSonera Launches Uzbek Review.)

BT's third-quarter results reveal that the U.K. operator has now passed more than 13 million premises with fiber, a quarterly sequential increase of around 1.3 million. Around 1.25 million homes and businesses are now taking a fiber-based service, via a connection provided by BT's Openreach networks access unit, though not all of these are BT Retail customers, as Openreach provides connections sold by other broadband service providers too. As for the financials, third-quarter revenues fell 6 percent year-on-year to £4.5 billion (US$7.1 billion), reports the BBC, but cost cutting helped its profits grow 7 percent to £675 million ($1.06 billion) during the same period. (See BT Openreach Adds More FTTX.)

Wayra, the startup promotion program set up under the auspices of Telefónica, has completed its first call for projects, which has brought forth 3,444 ideas for new technology companies to be developed at Wayra academies in Latin America and Europe. (See Euronews: Telefónica to Support 1,000 Startups and Inside Telefónica's Startup Incubator.) — Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading