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Bloomberg
Telecom Italia SpA’s board of directors may seek the resignation of Chief Executive Officer Amos Genish as early as this week, Il Messaggero newspaper reported, without saying where it got the information.
Directors backed by both Vivendi SA, the carrier’s biggest shareholder, and US activist Elliott Management Corp., which owns the
second-largest stake, have agreed to call an extraordinary board meeting to obtain Genish’s resignation, according to the newspaper.
Telecom Italia Chairman Fulvio Conti is considering Rocco Sabelli and Alfredo Altavilla as possible successors, Messaggero reported.
A spokesman for Telecom Italia said in an email that a board meeting has already been called for Dec. 6 and that no extraordinary session is scheduled before.
Italy’s populist government plans a regulatory framework to help set up a single telec-ommunications infrastructure that would allow a merger of the networks of Telecom Italia and state-backed Open Fiber SpA, newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore reported separately.
The measure would seek to avoid a breakup of Telecom Italia, and maintain a strategic asset — the landline grid — in Italian hands.
Genish, who is trying to revive the former monopoly under pressure from Elliott, suffered a double dose of bad news when the company scrapped a debt-reduction target and took a 2 billion-euro ($2.3 billion) asset writedown. New competitors are emerg-ing to threaten its domestic business and it considers an acquisition in Brazil.