RIO DE JANEIRO – It has not been an easy year for TIM Brasil, the Brazilian wireless unit of Telecom Italia. Earlier this year its (now) former CEO, Luca Luciani, resigned following a scandal involving the exaggeration of the carrier’s customer base through the use of irregular SIM cards in Italy.
More recently, the carrier has faced accusations from minority shareholder JVCO Participações, an investment vehicle for Brazilian investor Nelson Tanure, in TIM Participações, which has filed a lawsuit demanding restitution for about $5 billion (R$10 billion) in lost market value.
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At this week’s Futurecom event, the new president of TIM Brasil, Andrea Mangoni, said reputation is the greatest asset of the company. It was Mangoni’s first formal speech as CEO, and he was visibly nervous on stage.
Mangoni said he will not change the wireless carrier’s strategy, adding that TIM will keep its current offer of unlimited data plans for both prepaid and postpaid packages. Responding to claims that TIM had been purposely dropping calls in an attempt to handle network congestion, Mangoni noted that any other company would have failed after such accusation of purposeful termination of connections.
As for the JVCO Participações accusation, Mangoni declined to comment directly, but said the company’s balance sheet is transparent and audited. In a statement, TIM said that the company will be positioned on the case in court, and insisted that all its statements are solid, transparent and audited by independent companies.
