Crushing debt and an evaporating market: it must be bracing working in the 3G arm of a mobile operator these days. A couple of good features from yesterday’s FT (I think you can still see them for nothing for a few days). The first discusses the difficulty of raising money for 3G infrastructure investment post-crash (one Portugese licence holder has been waiting nine months to close a loan for 3G build-out). Worse, according to the second, customers don’t want the early, clunky, battery-hungry 3G handsets either. You evidently need balls of steel to push forward with investment in a 3G business these days.
Fascinating article about the horrendous Richard Scrushy, thoroughly disgraced (but still rich) CEO of Health South, a huge US health care provider. Scrushy was so vain that he had statues of himself put up at the schools he sponsored. Predictably, these statues are now meeting the same fate as Saddam’s. The FT calls the Health South scandal ‘grosser than Enron’. Here’s a useful special report from Scrushy’s local paper, The Birmingham News from Alabama.