The mobile phone tycoon has reportedly issued a writ against Rolls-Royce and Bentley Motor Cars Ltd after his third Bentley developed mechanical faults. Caudwell is claiming compensation and damages against Rolls Royce and car dealers Ron Stratton.

The writ has been lodged with the High Court in Manchester and lists problems with the cars warning lights brakes steering convertible roof and doors.

People take a great deal of pride in the ownership of the prestige brand.

The experience of owning the car nowhere near matches up to the image he told journalists at a press conference in Manchester.

Caudwell seeking a substantial amount of compensation and damages from Rolls-Royce and Ron Stratton following allegations of failures and defects in his open-topped car. He bought his first Bentley in 1993 and upgraded to a burgundy 230887 Bentley Azure convertible in 1997.

But the car had developed problems with its battery requiring it to be jump started.

Tow (35) started his career with Racal Electronics when it was setting up the cellular division which later became Racal Vodafone then Vodafone.

I was employee number 74. The other 73 were mainly engineers said Tow.

The 9p share price gives the company market capitalisation of just over 3.5 million and values chairman Warren Hardys 39.25 per cent share at just under 1.4 million.

Losses of 19 million were blamed on one-off costs such as the 15 million (cash and shares) Banner Telecom acquisition and abnormal trading conditions.

Also included in the deficit is 4 million from European Telecoms share of the losses of its joint venture Global Telematics. This 4 million included costs spent on the aborted flotation of Global Telematics.

European Telecoms bankers the Royal Bank of Scotland have agreed to continue providing banking and debt facilities to European Telecom for the next 12 months.

European Telecoms newly-appointed group managing director David McKinney said: The financial year ended March 31 was a very difficult and disappointing one.

The continuing support from our financiers is encouraging and we can now begin to focus our effort on operational improvements and restructuring our range of activities.

It is our firm intention to move ET forward as a leading supplier of value-added fulfilment services for the telecoms and converging industries McKinney said in a statement issued last week.

As part of its strategy to divest itself of non-core business European Telecom has offloaded its voice technology subsidiary ET Voice.

The ET Voice division set up to licence voice recognition software has been sold back to Swindon-based signal processing and speech recognition specialist Domain Dynamics.

Domain Dynamics invented TESPAR (Time Encoded Signal Processing and Recognition) technology which is an advanced voice recognition system designed for use in mobile phones and other devices (see interview P28).

BTCellnet is the official sponsor of the programme. BTCellnets service answers fans individual Big Brother queries by text message; as well as Big Brother voucher registrations trivia quizzes and BTCellnets free text alerts.

This is up from just under 500 million messages sent in the same period last year.

Mays figure gives an annual total so far of 4.4 billion messages. This means users are sending three million messages a day across all four networks.

Charges for calls to the UK within the visited country and incoming calls have been reduced from 99p to 75 pence a minute.

Text messages come down to 39p per message from 45p.

The reduced charges only apply if the user is logged on to European operators who are part of the Vodafone group. On other networks call charges remain unchanged.

The networks are: Airtel Vodafone (Spain); D2 Vodafone (Germany); ircell (Ireland); Europolitan (Sweden); Libertel (Holland); Omnitel (Italy); Panafon (Greece); SFR (France); Swisscom (Switzerland); Telecel (Portugal) and Tele.ring (Austria).

Vodafone refutes suggestions it has u-turned on its decision to try and move its business away from pre-pay and back onto contracts.

We are simply adding another service for our eight million pre-pay customers. It gives them an opportunity to use their phones abroad and creates extra revenue for Vodafone. Its not a new service.

We launched pre-pay roaming in May. Vodafone spokesperson Julien Couzens said.

Vodafone last week launched the third phase in its 2 million youth marketing programme with a 700000 cinema campaign supporting the new youth web site www.vod4fon3.com (see Site Seeing P40)

The commercial is showing at all cinemas showing Tomb Raider

The product appeared on the site because of an isolated system error which has now removed.

The Carphone Warehouse has written to all those who tried to order a free 9210 to apologise for the error and to offer them 10 off the price of any other handset they wish to buy (see Sharp End).

The legal get out for The Carphone Warehouse is that the terms and conditions of its web site only apply when a credit card has been debited or an e-mail confirmation sent out.

In another e-commerce development on-line book store Amazon is to sell pre-pay phones supplied by The Carphone Warehouse.

Customers of the co-branded site will be able to choose from handsets such as Nokia Motorola Siemens Panasonic and Sony. Amazon is responsible for stocking selling and delivering the products.

The Carphone Warehouse will become Amazons preferred provider of contract and upgrade phones through links from Amazons co-branded phone store to a co-branded area of The Carpone Warehouse web iste. Amazon will become the first on-line retailer to have a link from The Carphone Warehouses homepage.

Ronnie Kamya (21) of Wembley is also charged with dishonestly handling a stolen Barclays Bank debit card on the same day.

The sabotage could cost Orange up to 25000 to repair and follows local opposition to the masts erection.

A Strathclyde Police spokeswoman confirmed the incident happened on July 14.

The security guard was not injured. Orange said the company is working with police and that the mast was not operational at the time of the attack.

A statement from the network said:

Orange can confirm that its transmitter site at Castlehill Farm Kilmalcolm Port Glasgow was severely damaged by vandals on Saturday 14 July 2001.

The telecommunications installation which was under construction was not operational at the time.

Orange has taken steps to ensure the safety of the site since the incident and we are now working with Strathclyde Police to investigate the matter further.

This is an isolated incident and in no way affects how we proceed with the construction of our other sites across the UK.

It is understood that the mast suffered severe damage.

Johnson who was the third director of The Carphone Warehouse in 1989 with Charles Dunstone and David Rossholds around 10 per cent equity share of 92.76 million shares.

He has agreed not to sell his shares for two years without board consent. He is also prohibited from being active in the mobile phone industry.

But with a paper fortune of well over 100 million it is unlikely Johnson feels the need to earn a living by dealing in mobile phones.

Charles Dunstone chairman and chief executive officer said:

Guy has been with The Carphone Warehouse since soon after the business was established. He is a good friend and he leaves with our best wishes. Over the past year much of Guys responsibilities were devolved to other members of his team. He is able to leave without affecting the continuing operation and growth of the business. We wish him every success in the future.

The company has changed massively. He indicated to me a little while ago he wanted to do less. Were assigning his responsibilities to other people. Were not recruiting someone to replace him specifically. Ours is a European business now and Guy was only working within the UK said Dunstone.

Sources close to The Carphone Warehouse say Johnson had been unhappy with the post-flotation procedures that required much more formality and dealings with the City.