Renuncia funcionario italiano por caso Telecom Italia (Inglés)

A leading economic aide to Prime Minister Romano Prodi of Italy resigned Monday, a day after Prodi bowed to opposition pressure and agreed to have his government face parliamentary questioning over a clash with Telecom Italia that led the company’s chairman to resign.
 
The aide, Angelo Rovati, said in Beijing, where the Italian government is leading a delegation of business executives and bankers seeking to strengthen economic and political ties with China, that he was quitting to ease tensions over Italy’s largest telephone company. Rovati had recommended that the state buy back part of Telecom Italia.
 
Telecom Italia last week announced plans for a restructuring that would spin off the company’s mobile telephone unit, TIM. Prodi said that he was «surprised and disconcerted» by the plan and that the government had not been informed about the restructuring. He expressed hope that TIM, the only mobile phone company operating in Italy that is not in foreign hands, would remain under Italian control.
 
The Telecom Italia chairman, Marco Tronchetti Provera, resigned abruptly Friday.
 
The opposition and some members of Prodi’s center-left coalition urged the prime minister to explain to Parliament to explain why he had openly clashed with Tronchetti Provera. But Prodi resisted, calling those who had urged him to speak to legislators «crazy.» He finally bowed to the demands Sunday, though he said the ministers concerned would appear in Parliament, implying that he himself would not.
 
«It’s in the nation’s interest to debate the future of Italy’s telecommunications sector and its most important group,» Prodi said in a statement issued in Beijing.
 
Telecom Italia has debt of more than €40 billion, or $50.6 billion. After two years of seeking to integrate its fixed- line and mobile businesses, the restructuring announced last week calls for creating stand-alone companies for its network and mobile unit TIM.
 
Telecom Italia’s new chairman, Guido Rossi, said Sunday that the group was strong and «an example of modern capitalism.» But Rossi was quoted by La Repubblica as saying he had to extract the group from «the risk of renationalization.»
 
On Friday, Telecom Italia’s board reaffirmed the strategy shift to focus on broadband and media over telephony. Over the weekend, the company agreed to buy Time Warner’s AOL Germany division for €675 million, giving it 3.2 million subscribers in Germany, including two million broadband customers.
 
«This acquisition,» said the Telecom Italia chief executive, Riccardo Ruggiero, «marks a further step in Telecom Italia’s strategy of focusing on broadband services and content delivery at an international level.»
 
Fuente: International Herald Tribune, con información de Bloomberg News, Reuters, The Associated Press