We featured Marco Tronchetti's efforts to restructure Telecom Italia and bolster the communication behemoth's lagging stock.
Telecom Italia owned 81% of TIM (short for Telecom Italia Mobile) Hellas at the time.
The buyers say Telecom Italia accepted the lower offers because TIM's fortunes were declining.
Mediobanca, Italy's old wheeling and dealing investment bank, managed Telecom Italia's privatisation in 1997.
Telecom Italia, another lethargic distributor, is only now training its sales force to sell the devices.
With Telecom Italia, Vicunha has won a mobile-phone licence for Bahia in Brazil's north-east.
Recently Fastweb won a government contract away from Telecom Italia with a 50% price cut.
Nevertheless, Franco Bernabe, Telecom Italia's chief executive, and his fellow directors have taken a battering.
Telecom Italia, one of Europe's pioneering telecoms firms in the 1990s, looks headed for an inglorious future.
ECONOMIST: Italy��s biggest telecoms firm faces an uncertain future
In order to win control of Telecom Italia, however, Olivetti saddled itself with enormous amounts of debt.
ECONOMIST: A risky move into telecoms has upset a lot of shareholders
Others think that Telecom Italia's industrial and financial plans to fend off Olivetti are not good enough.
Tronchetti still wields influence as chairman of holding company Olimpia, which controls 18% of Telecom Italia's voting shares.
First, there's the wireless Internet access with Telecom Italia, which has 3 million mobile phone customers in Brazil.
That's the province of handset manufacturers such as HTC, or service providers such as Sprint and Telecom Italia.
Argentina's two main phone firms are owned by Spain's Telefonica and an alliance of Telecom Italia and France Telecom.
Breaking up the firm along these lines would turn the rump of Telecom Italia into a customer-facing retail business.
ECONOMIST: Italy��s biggest telecoms firm faces an uncertain future
Given all that, Telecom Italia may end up looking more modern than Olivetti as a result of the bid.
Telecom Italia's new bosses have inherited the huge debts that Olivetti took on.
ECONOMIST: A risky move into telecoms has upset a lot of shareholders
Last year, it made an abortive attempt to rescue Telecom Italia, Italy's former monopolist, from the clutches of Olivetti.
Telecom Italia's statutes state that the biggest shareholder is allowed to appoint four-fifths, or 16 seats, of its 20-member board.
At Telecom Italia in April, minority shareholders put forward a list of alternative directors, which won 20% of the votes.
Telecom Italia cut back on Sun servers by adopting the software of Critical Path Inc. for 10 million e-mail accounts.
It will compete with the incumbent Telecom Italia in providing local telephony but will transfer customers' long-distance calls to the incumbent.
The Telecom Italia experience has made him cognisant of what it takes to be the CEO of a global business today.
To deal with this millstone, Pirelli will need to do much more than merely service it using Telecom Italia's dividend flows.
ECONOMIST: A risky move into telecoms has upset a lot of shareholders
But then Mr Murdoch disappeared, only to reappear on the European scene in December, this time holding hands with Telecom Italia.
True, the bid from Olivetti was so outrageous as to seem unbelievable, but Telecom Italia's defence has been slow and complacent.
Fixed-line telephony still has a future then, but doesn't this mean having to deal with an incumbent telco, such as Telecom Italia?
Telecom Italia cut back on the need for Sun servers by adopting the software of Critical Path for 10 million e-mail accounts.
Telecom Italia says the services were not material to the buyout price.
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