‘The Inbetweeners’ Canceled by MTV

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “The Inbetweeners” now falls solidly in the “canceled” camp.

MTV has decided not to go forward with a second season of the scripted series, which premiered in August and was an adaptation of a British sitcom of the same name.

“While we won’t be moving forward with another season of ‘The Inbetweeners,’ we enjoyed working with the show’s creators and such a talented, funny cast,” an MTV spokesperson told TheWrap in a statement.

The series starred Joey Pollari, Bubba Lewis, Zack Pearlman, Mark L. Young and Alex Frnka as a group of “inbetweeners” – that is, kids who fall somewhere between nerds and jocks on the spectrum of teenage cliques.

The “Inbetweeners” cancelation follows the dropping of the MTV scripted effort “I Just Want My Pants Back” in May after one season.

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Small sachets are big help for clean water in developing world

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Greg Allgood tears open a small sachet and dumps the powder into a large plastic container filled with brown, murky water. After about five minutes of stirring, clumps of sludge form and sink to the bottom as the water starts to clear.

“You let it settle, pour it through a cotton cloth and then you wait 20 minutes and it’s ready to drink,” said Allgood, the U.S.-based director of Procter & Gamble Co’s not-for-profit programme to provide clean water in developing nations and disaster zones.

“We reverse engineered a municipal water treatment plant, so something that costs tens of millions of dollars we can make for three and a half cents.”

P&G, a consumer products giant, works with international and local humanitarian groups such as Care, World Vision and Save the Children to get the sachets to areas where dirty water is a leading cause of illness and death.

One sachet purifies 10 liters (2.6 gallons) of water, enough for five people for one day, and it does not matter that the container and straining cloth are not clean. Shipping, duties and distribution, education and training by the groups on the ground take the final cost to about 10 U.S. cents per packet.

The dirt in Allgood’s demonstration came from his garden, where his dog likes to romp. Iron sulphate is the coagulant that pulls together soil, heavy metals and parasites. Chlorine – a precise 80 granules per sachet – kills viruses and bacteria, including those that cause cholera.

“When the water is really dirty, there aren’t a lot of low-cost technologies that work very well,” Allgood, who has a PhD in toxicology and is P&G’s point person in the Clinton Global Initiative, told Reuters in an interview before the formal opening of a new production plant in Singapore on Thursday.

“It seems strange to us but I hear it so many times – people see this and they say ‘Oh my God, I was drinking dirty water’.”

About 40 million sachets will be made this year at a plant in Pakistan and 100 million in Singapore, which is also P&G’s global disaster relief hub. The goal is to make 200 million a year by 2020, equal to 2 billion liters of clean water.

Many of the sachets are sent to development projects in Africa and emerging Asian countries but were also handed out to people hit by floods and other disasters in Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Haiti, Allgood said.

Clean water is also vital to people with HIV/AIDS, he added, as their damaged immune systems make them very vulnerable to life-threatening diarrhoea and other infections.

“It goes well with Scotch,” Allgood joked, handing over a glass of clear, clean water that had been dangerous to drink 30 minutes earlier and now had only a slight taste of chlorine.

In Haiti after the devastating earthquake of 2010, he said, the sachets were part of relief supplies and he visited tents for cholera victims, showing aid workers how the powder works.

“I grabbed a bucket out of the place where the effluent was from where they washed the clinic. I went and treated it and told the World Vision folks we had to drink it,” he said. “They looked at me like I was crazy. But we did drink it.”

(Reporting by John O’Callaghan, editing by Elaine Lies)

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Is SAC Capital’s Steve Cohen Worth Catching?

Preet Bharara started work as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York on Aug. 13, 2009, less than a year after the most harrowing days of the financial crisis. Bharara’s office is known for prosecuting crime on Wall Street; his predecessors include Elihu Root, Henry Stimson, and Rudy Giuliani. In three and a half years on the job, Bharara has won convictions against Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, accused arms trafficker Victor Bout, and multiple corrupt New York politicians. But his claim to fame—the one that earned him the cover of Time last February—is his single-minded devotion to eliminating an insider-trading epidemic that seems to be rampant at certain hedge funds in and around New York City.

Two days before Thanksgiving, Bharara, who has already won some 70 convictions for insider trading, collected another pelt. At his direction, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Mathew Martoma, a 38-year-old former hedge fund manager at SAC Capital Advisors, at Martoma’s 8,000-square-foot Boca Raton (Fla.) mansion. In a statement, Bharara described Martoma’s alleged crime as “cheating coming and going—specifically, insider trading first on the long side, and then on the short side, on a scale that has no historical precedent.” Conspicuously absent from Bharara’s statement was any mention of Martoma’s former boss, Steven Cohen, the founder of SAC Capital. But Wall Street is rife with speculation that Cohen is Bharara’s ultimate target.

The possibility that Cohen might share the fate of fellow hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, who was found guilty of conspiracy and securities fraud in May 2011 and sentenced to 11 years in prison, has caused a frisson of anticipation in the financial world. On Nov. 28, the president of SAC Capital, Tom Conheeney, told investors that the Securities and Exchange Commission is considering filing a civil suit against the firm.

Yet Cohen may prove to be an elusive prey. And it’s worth asking whether relentlessly hunting insider-trading suspects like Cohen is a wise use of the government’s resources—especially considering that the people responsible for the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression continue to get off scot-free.

Cohen himself is no small fish. He grew up in Great Neck, Long Island, the third of eight children. His father owned a clothing manufacturer in the Bronx; his mother was a piano teacher. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978, Cohen took a job at Gruntal & Co., a small Wall Street brokerage. An amazingly successful if restless trader, he made millions for himself and for Gruntal. In 1992, hungry for a bigger platform, he set up a hedge fund with a $ 25 million grubstake—half of which was his own money. In the first year, the fund was up 17 percent; the next year it was up 51 percent. The rest is the stuff of Wall Street legend, as are his $ 1 billion art collection and his 36,000-square-foot mansion in Greenwich, Conn. SAC Capital now has some $ 14 billion under management.

Bharara has been circling Cohen for years, pursuing a slew of additional insider-trading charges against seven former SAC traders. But he hasn’t snared Cohen. And the Martoma gambit may fall short as well.

The gist of Bharara’s complaint against Martoma is that between 2006 and 2008, Martoma obtained material, nonpublic information from Dr. Sid Gilman, now 80, a neurologist at the University of Michigan, who was a paid consultant to two health-care companies, Elan (ELN) and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (now part of Pfizer (PFE)), working together to develop a new Alzheimer’s drug. At first, Gilman shared with Martoma the good news that the drug trial was going well. As a result, Martoma and SAC amassed around a $ 700 million stake in Elan and Wyeth. In March 2008, when other executives at SAC Capital were questioning the large investment in the two companies, Cohen defended it by writing that Martoma “anticipated positive news” from the drug trial and he was the person “closest” to it.

On July 17, 2008, just days before he was to share his confidential findings at a health-care conference, Gilman told Martoma there were problems with the drug trial. Martoma then e-mailed Cohen: “Is there a good time to catch up with you this morning? It’s important.” One hour later, Cohen responded with his cell-phone number. According to the sworn affidavit of the FBI agent investigating the case, the two men talked for 20 minutes. At Cohen’s direction, during the next four days, SAC Capital dumped most, but not all, of its stock in the companies. It also put on a large short trade—betting the companies’ stock would fall.

On July 30, after the public announcement about the drug trial at the industry conference, the shares of Elan and Wyeth fell, 42 percent and 12 percent, respectively. According to Bharara, SAC Capital not only made profits of about $ 83 million on its short trade but also avoided losses of about $ 194 million had it not sold its stock in the two companies a few weeks earlier—a $ 276 million swing. (Bharara called it “The most lucrative inside tip of all time.”) In 2008, SAC paid Martoma a $ 9.3 million bonus. In 2010, Martoma was fired from the firm after two years of unsatisfactory performance and because he appeared to be “a one-trick pony with Elan,” according to an SAC e-mail. (His lawyer said in a statement that Martoma is innocent.)

In exchange for his cooperation, Dr. Gilman and the U.S. Department of Justice have entered into a non-prosecution agreement. According to the Wall Street Journal, the FBI and Bharara tried for a year to get Martoma to flip and cooperate with them against Cohen. Unlike the Rajaratnam case, there are no recordings of incriminating conversations involving Cohen and his portfolio managers or outside tipsters. The New York Times described the evidence compiled by the FBI against Cohen as “entirely circumstantial.”

Among other things, Cohen is a brilliant poker player—which means he’s adept at not tipping his hand. In a rare interview with Vanity Fair’s Bryan Burrough in July 2010, he brushed aside the implication that he had done anything like what Rajaratnam was accused of. “I look at my firm, and I don’t see any of that. In some respects I feel like Don Quixote fighting windmills,” he told Burrough. “There’s a perception, and I’m trying to fight that perception. I find it offensive that they lump SAC into these articles. I really do. The press, I mean, they don’t understand what the hell—they don’t understand what they’re writing about.”

When it comes to winning a conviction for insider trading, the law requires not only proof that material, nonpublic information was exchanged but also that the exchange of that information constituted “a breach of duty” to someone—say, shareholders or a board of directors. When Bharara won the conviction of Rajat Gupta, the former McKinsey senior partner who was on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs (GS), the jury found that Gupta had both shared insider information about Goldman with Rajaratnam and violated his duty to Goldman’s shareholders not to do so. That could be a snag in any case against Cohen. To whom did Cohen “breach” his “duty”? Certainly not his fund investors, who benefited tremendously from the trade. Still, the one journalist who has spoken to Cohen in recent years, Burrough, predicted in an e-mail to me, “They’re gonna get Cohen. They wouldn’t be building this pyramid if they didn’t intend to.”

If Cohen and his firm are nothing more than a criminal enterprise engaged in widespread insider trading, then Bharara is absolutely right to spend his time and his office’s resources going after them. Insider trading is justifiably illegal because the proper functioning of the capital markets depends on people having confidence the market is not a rigged game.

The bigger question for government prosecutors, though, is why none of the traders, bankers, or executives at the Wall Street banks who caused the 2008 financial crisis has been brought to justice. After the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, some 3,500 bankers ended up criminally prosecuted and behind bars. This time around, no one on Wall Street has done jail time. In a June 2011 speech, Bharara said, “We too want to hold accountable anyone who deserves to be punished. … Any case we make, however, will be because it is appropriate and deserved, not because there is overwhelming public pressure to do so.”

It’s true that the only thing worse than allowing the bankers to get away unscathed is prosecutorial misconduct. There’s a world of difference, however, between being meticulous and careful in bringing cases and appearing to do nothing at all when trillions of dollars have been lost and not a soul has been held accountable. That doesn’t mean the government should stop looking into the misdeeds of the likes of Steve Cohen. But it shouldn’t ignore those who did worse.

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Rapper PSY wants Tom Cruise to go ‘Gangnam Style’

BANGKOK (AP) — The South Korean rapper behind YouTube’s most-viewed video ever has set what might be a “Mission: Impossible” for himself.

Asked which celebrity he would like to see go “Gangnam Style,” the singer PSY told The Associated Press: “Tom Cruise!”

Surrounded by screaming fans, he then chuckled at the idea of the American movie star doing his now famous horse-riding dance.

PSY’s comments Wednesday in Bangkok were his first public remarks since his viral smash video — with 838 million views — surpassed Justin Bieber‘s “Baby,” which until Saturday held the record with 803 million views.

“It’s amazing,” PSY told a news conference, saying he never set out to become an international star. “I made this video just for Korea, actually. And when I released this song — wow.”

The video has spawned hundreds of parodies and tribute videos and earned him a spotlight alongside a variety of superstars.

Earlier this month, Madonna invited PSY onstage and they danced to his song at one of her New York City concerts. MC Hammer introduced the Korean star at the American Music Awards as, “My Homeboy PSY!”

Even President Barack Obama is talking about him. Asked on Election Day if he could do the dance, Obama replied: “I think I can do that move,” but then concluded he might “do it privately for Michelle,” the first lady.

PSY was in Thailand to give a free concert Wednesday night organized as a tribute to the country’s revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who turns 85 next month. He paid respects to the king at a Bangkok shopping mall, signing his name in an autograph book placed beside a giant poster of the king. He then gave an outdoor press conference, as screaming fans nearby performed the pop star’s dance.

Determined not to be a one-hit wonder, PSY said he plans to release a worldwide album in March with dance moves that he thinks his international fans will like.

“I think I have plenty of dance moves left,” he said, in his trademark sunglasses and dark suit. “But I’m really concerned about the (next) music video.”

“How can I beat ‘Gangnam Style’?” he asked, smiling. “How can I beat 850 million views?”

___

Associated Press writer Thanyarat Doksone contributed to this report.

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Nintendo: more than 400,000 Wii Us sold in US

NEW YORK (AP) — Nintendo says it has sold more than 400,000 of its new video game console, the Wii U, in its first week on sale in the U.S.

The Wii U launched on Nov. 18 in the U.S. at a starting price of $ 300. Nintendo says the sales figure, based on internal estimates, is through Nov. 24.

Six years ago, Nintendo Co. sold 475,000 of the original Wii in that console’s first seven days in stores. The original Wii remains available, and Nintendo says it sold more than 300,000 of them last week, along with roughly 250,000 handheld Nintendo 3DS units and about 275,000 of the Nintendo DS.

Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter estimates that Nintendo will ship 1 million to 1.5 million Wii Us in the U.S. through the end of January.

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U.S. author sues filmmaker Tyler Perry over plot of 2012 film

NEW YORK (Reuters) – An American author sued the prolific filmmaker Tyler Perry in a federal court on Tuesday, accusing him of lifting the plot of his 2012 movie, “Good Deeds,” from her book.

Terri Donald, who also writes under the pseudonym TLO Red’ness, says Perry based the film on her 2007 book, “Bad Apples Can Be Good Fruit.”

The lawsuit, filed in Philadelphia, says Donald sent a copy of her book to Perry’s company before production on the movie began.

Donald is seeking $ 225,000 in initial damages as well as an injunction requiring the company to add a credit for her book in the opening and closing credits. The lawsuit also calls for the company to provide an accounting of the movie’s revenues.

The drama, which stars Perry as a wealthy businessman who meets a struggling single mother, earned approximately $ 35 million at the box office after its February release.

Representatives for Perry and Lions Gate Entertainment, which released the film and is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit, did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.

Perry is best known for his portrayal in drag of the character Madea in several of his films.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Paul Simao)

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Indian board rejects AstraZeneca’s patent plea on cancer drug

(Reuters) – India‘s patents appeal board has dismissed British drugmaker AstraZeneca‘s petition challenging an earlier ruling that refused patent protection for a cancer-fighting drug, in the latest blow for Big Pharma in the country.

The Indian patents office in 2007 refused patent protection to AstraZeneca’s quinazoline molecule, citing lack of invention. The Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB) on Monday upheld the refusal.

The decision is also a setback for struggling AstraZeneca, which is battling to turn itself around as key drugs lose patent protection.

Global drug companies suffered a high-profile reversal in March when India granted the first ever compulsory license to domestic drugmaker Natco Pharma to sell cheap copies of Bayer’s cancer drug Nexavar. Bayer has appealed the order.

And early this month IPAB revoked a six-year-old Indian patent granted to Roche’s hepatitis C drug Pegasys, citing lack of evidence that the drug was any better than existing treatments.

Multinational drug manufacturers regard India’s $ 13 billion drug market as a huge opportunity, but are wary of what they see as lax protection for intellectual property in a country where generic medicines account for more than 90 percent of sales.

Indian generic companies, which do not need to plough money into future research, can produce drugs at a fraction of the cost of originator firms like Roche or Bayer.

Natco and another domestic drugmaker, G. M. Pharma, had opposed the initial patent application for AstraZeneca quinazoline derivative. The London-listed company filed a review petition, which India’s patent office dismissed in 2011.

A challenge to a review petition does not come under the purview of the IPAB, and even on merit the petition has failed, S. Majumdar & Co, the counsel for Natco Pharma, said in a statement.

AstraZeneca could not immediately be reached for a comment by Reuters. The company has the option to take its case to India’s Supreme Court.

(Reporting by Kaustubh Kulkarni in MUMBAI; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

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S.Africa’s rand holds on to surprise gains

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – S.Africa’s rand held firm against the dollar Wednesday, consolidating a surprisingly strong performance in the previous session after weaker-than-expected economic growth figures.

The rand was little changed at 0611 GMT, trading at 8.8434 against the greenback after New York’s close of 8.845.

“The international backdrop remains negative this morning but the trend for rand gains remains strong,” Rand Merchant Bank said in a note.

Investors are likely to pay attention to a speech by Reserve Bank Governor Gill Marcus at a conference of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) at 0800 GMT.

Marcus left the repo rate unchanged at a four-decade low of 5.0 percent last week and warned that strikes in the mining sector and beyond since August would lead to job losses in a country already grappling with unemployment of over 25 percent.

Tuesday’s GDP statistics drove home that point, showing that growth slowed sharply in the third quarter after a big contraction in the strike-hit mining sector.

Government bond yields slipped one basis point each to 5.46 percent for the three year bond and 7.555 percent for the longer dated 14-year paper.

Power utility Eskom is due to auction 400 million rand between the EL29 and ES33 bonds at 0900 GMT.

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Rugby-England add flyhalf Burns to squad for All Blacks’ test

LONDON, Nov 27 (Reuters) – England called up uncapped Gloucester flyhalf Freddie Burns on Tuesday to their squad for Saturday’s test against New Zealand in place of the injured Toby Flood.

Flood sustained ligament damage to a big toe during the 16-15 loss to South Africa at Twickenham last Saturday.

Owen Farrell, whose last start was in the first test in South Africa this year, is set to replace Flood in the starting XV against the world champions.

Lock Courtney Lawes, who missed England’s first three tests of the November series because of a knee injury, has also been included in the 23-man squad. Two other locks, Mouritz Botha and Tom Palmer, have been omitted.

After beating Fiji in their opening match, England have lost to Australia and the Springboks and now face a daunting match against the All Blacks who are unbeaten in 20 tests since the start of their victorious World Cup campaign last year.

“For those in Saturday’s squad the message is clear – last week we went toe to toe with the second best team in the world and felt we should have won,” England head coach Stuart Lancaster said in a statement.

“Now we have a chance to take on the number one side in front of a passionate Twickenham crowd, who have been fantastic throughout the Internationals, and it is a challenge we will meet head on.” (Reporting by John Mehaffey; Editing by Ken Ferris)

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Exclusive: Egyptian investor seeks to put stamp on Telecom Italia

DUBAI (Reuters) – Egyptian entrepreneur Naguib Sawiris aims to shake up debt-laden Telecom Italia and steer it towards expansion in Brazil if shareholders warm up to his proposal for a 3 billion euro ($ 3.9 billion) cash infusion.

The billionaire tycoon, who got to know Italy well when he owned the third-biggest mobile operator Wind, has put on the table a capital increase that could make him one of the biggest shareholders in Telecom Italia.

Details on the structure of the proposed transaction are scarce, but Sawiris told Reuters that he proposed that the capital increase be open to all shareholders, not just himself, and that it should be conducted around the current market price of 0.70 euros per share.

That is likely to draw the ire of other Telecom Italia shareholders, including Spain’s Telefonica and the three Italian financial institutions who together own 22.4 percent via an unlisted holding company called Telco.

They value Telecom Italia at 1.50 euros per share in their accounts, and Marco Fossati, whose family’s Findim Group SA owns 5 percent of the Italian operator, on Monday said 1.50 was the “correct price” for any capital increase.

Sawiris, going against a trend of retreating investment in crisis-hit southern Europe, said he might also bring in some of his old Wind associates to put Telecom Italia back on the path to growth.

“This proposal will provide a more stable financial structure for Telecom Italia going forward, more growth in Latin America and Brazil, and improved management through the infusion of people who have an excellent knowledge of the Italian market,” Sawiris told Reuters.

Sawiris initially approached Telefonica and the other shareholders in Telco about the possibility of carrying out a capital increase at the holding company level. He was rebuffed, so decided to approach the Italian group directly.

“We are willing to participate in the capital increase, but shareholders have the choice not to get diluted and join in putting the money,” he said.

“If they do not want to, we will come and replace them. But they will benefit from a higher stock price and a more stable company and a company that will grow.”

It remains to be seen whether his vision for the group will be shared by Telecom Italia’s management and core shareholders.

Telefonica, insurer Assicurazioni Generali, and banks Mediobanca and Intesa Sanpaolo had the Sawiris’ offer dropped onto them as a bombshell two weeks ago, insiders have said.

“Sawiris is not a man to go in without being sure he can drive the strategy,” one source familiar with the thinking of the core shareholders said.

Sawiris told Reuters he was also opposed to a current plan to spin off Telecom Italia’s fixed-line network, which is backed by some core investors as a way to raise badly needed cash, and by the Italian government as a means to speed up broadband investment.

“I believe this is a catastrophe,” Sawiris said. “If Telecom Italia does that, they will lose the only differentiator they have left in the telecom market in Italy.”

Telecom Italia is now in talks with an Italian state-backed investment fund over such a spin-off. Under the plan, the fund would take a minority stake in the new company in exchange for Telecom Italia effectively becoming a wholesaler of broadband capacity to other companies.

Proponents of the spin-off argue the move would help Telecom Italia reduce debt while accelerating the modernization of the woeful Internet infrastructure in Europe’s fourth-largest economy.

STRATEGY CROSSROAD

Telecom Italia’s board will meet on December 6 to discuss the network spin-off and whether to bid for Vivendi’s GVT, a broadband specialist in Brazil, to complement its TIM Brasil mobile business unit in the fast-growing market.

GVT’s owner, Vivendi, is seeking up to 7 billion euros for GVT, which provides fixed telephone, broadband, and TV services in 120 Brazilian cities. Preliminary bids are due in December, sources have told Reuters.

Sawiris is waiting in the wings, though he says he has not had any direct contact from Telecom Italia since sending a letter of interest two weeks ago.

However, advisers from both sides – Lazard for Sawiris and Rothschild for Telecom Italia – have been communicating, according to people familiar with the matter.

Meanwhile, sources close to the telecom group’s shareholders have complained of a lack of detail in the Sawiris proposal.

Nuno Matias, a telecoms analyst at Espirito Santo bank, said while Sawiris’s arguments about seeking growth in Brazil via the GVT takeover were persuasive, the tycoon could face an uphill battle getting the board and shareholders onside.

“Sawiris isn’t alone; there are controlling shareholders of Telecom Italia, and they have their own interests,” he said.

“If Telecom Italia strengthens in Brazil then it sets up a conflict with Telefonica.”

Sawiris pointed out that he tried talking to Telefonica.

“I met with them, but my feeling is that they are conflicted. They are happy where they are today holding Telecom Italia as a hostage and preventing it from growing into Latin America.”

Telefonica and Telecom Italia are the number one and number two players in Brazilian mobile, respectively, and also compete in Argentina. The conflict means that Telefonica cannot take part in board deliberations at Telecom Italia over the Latin American units.

Telefonica’s Chief Financial Officer Angel Vila said last week that the group wanted to remain a long-term shareholder in Telecom Italia, and opposed a capital increase.

Telecom Italia has made debt-cutting a priority since late 2008. Cost cuts and asset sales have trimmed net debt more than 4 billion euros to 29.5 billion at the end of September.

Morgan Stanley predicted its net debt was likely to stand at 27.8 billion euros at year-end, or 2.7 times earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), above sector averages and in the warning zone for rating agencies.

Sawiris, who sold Wind to Vimpelcom last year, wants to re-enter Italy by investing in the incumbent operator, betting on low valuations and turnaround potential in old-world telecoms.

“I’ve worked in Italy for five years and what I’ve learned that very few investors have the insight on what is the real story in Italy,” Sawiris said.

($ 1 = 0.7713 euros)

(Additional reporting by Leila Abboud in Paris and Lisa Jucca in Milan; Editing by Will Waterman)

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