Grant Gross
Senior Writer

In Brief: AT&T ends talks for stake in Telecom Italia

news
Apr 17, 20071 min

AT&T has ended negotiations to buy a one-third stake in Olimpia, a holding company that owns about 18 percent of Telecom Italia SpA’s ordinary shares.

AT&T, in a statement released Monday, said it appreciated the opportunity to explore a possible investment in Olimpia and Telecom Italia, but it has decided not to pursue the matter further. AT&T, which announced negotiations in early April, did not give a reason for the withdrawal.

Concerns in Italy about foreign ownership of Telecom Italia appear to have scuttled the AT&T deal, said Mike Cansfield, a telecom analyst for Ovum. Unions have protested the deal.

Grant Gross

Grant Gross, a senior writer at CIO, is a long-time IT journalist who has focused on AI, enterprise technology, and tech policy. He previously served as Washington, D.C., correspondent and later senior editor at IDG News Service. Earlier in his career, he was managing editor at Linux.com and news editor at tech careers site Techies.com. As a tech policy expert, he has appeared on C-SPAN and the giant NTN24 Spanish-language cable news network. In the distant past, he worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Minnesota and the Dakotas. A finalist for Best Range of Work by a Single Author for both the Eddie Awards and the Neal Awards, Grant was recently recognized with an ASBPE Regional Silver award for his article “Agentic AI: Decisive, operational AI arrives in business.”

More from this author