How Telkom lost connection
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25 August 2010
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A month before Jeff Molobela took over as chairman from Shirley Arnold at Telkom in November last year, he started meeting the 12 board members individually. The meetings were lengthy enough for the board members to raise concern about two albatrosses - the launch of its mobile service and its loss-making Nigerian subsidiary Multi-Links
"It (Multi-Links) could sink Telkom," he was told. They were right. It has emerged that Multi-Links made a loss of R659-million in the latest financial year, and is still bleeding cash.
Molobela was worried and wanted to get to the bottom of what was ailing Telkom. He not only went through the minutes of the past three board meetings, he also asked to see the board's resolutions of the past five years. And he had brief meetings with the executive team and attended strategy meetings.
While it started cordially, his probing was soon interpreted as interference by some board members, while the market viewed i...
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