The US hedge fund Elliott Associates has leveled serious accusations at Deutsche Telekom. In a letter addressed to the group’s senior management the fund expresses dismay at allegedly having witnessed the destruction of 16 billion euros-worth of shareholder value last year, Börsen-Zeitung, a German publication dealing with investor issues, reports. Moreover the letter, according to the paper, claims that the company’s executive and supervisory boards were doing too little to generate positive annual rates of return.
Elliott Associates is also said to have sharply reproached the Bonn-based group for its business dealings in Poland. With respect to these the hedge fund is accusing Deutsche Telekom of having committed “a massive breach of its fiduciary duty” to manage the company’s assets well. At the end of January Deutsche Telekom had paid the wages and other current items of Poland’s largest mobile operator PTC/Era GSM, the letter is said to state. Deutsche Telekom’s stake in the latter company is 49 percent. For years now a fierce battle for control of a further 48 percent of the shares in the company has been in progress between Deutsche Telekom and the French telecommunications and media group Vivendi – with no conclusive end in sight yet.
