The following blog entry has been republished here courtesy of Telecoms in Latvia.

TeliaSonera’s head of Mobility, Kenneth Karlberg, left or was eased out of his position at the Swedish telecoms group. It was only two weeks after I interviewed him for this blog. Mobility had shown good results and Kenneth was preparing to go (or sent his people) to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to look for more suppliers of 4G modems after being the first in the world to launch the high speed mobile broadband service last December.
It looks like Karlberg was discreetly fired from TeliaSonera because of some internal problems with others in top management. Margins and EBITDA earnings were up for Mobility, revenues were almost unchanged despite the recession in Sweden and globally. Things looked good on his watch, perhaps too good and others may have felt threatened that one star was outshining the others. The official press released in its English-language version contains the strange phrase “we need to change certain behaviors and act more like one company”. Whose behaviors? And was a strong Mobility pulling ahead of the rest of the TeliaSonera group? I have not had time to scan the Swedish business press for their analysis of what all this means in terms of possible office politics. It is not unique to TeliaSonera, there seems to have been a management “Night of The Long Knives” at the top of Tele2.
As far as this blogger is concerned, Kenneth’s departure means that he takes the whole portfolio of experience in dealing with Latvia and the Baltic states with him wherever he is going. There, since he will not be trying to work out a deal to privatize Lattelecom and LMT, it will be of little use to anyone. Indeed, the deal is now in nobody’s hands as far as TeliaSonera is concerned (or that I have heard). Anyone who wants to take up where Kenneth (who was in charge of business in the Baltics before TeliaSonera’s last reorganization) will have to start more or less from scratch. As far as Kenneth’s plans to at least work out the details of a possible transaction despite Latvia’s election year (as he says in my videoblog), so that only the price and date would have to be finalized — well, that has fallen off the back burner somewhere behind the stove. A setback for the privatization of Latvia’s two biggest telecoms operators, at least if one thinks selling to the Swedes is not such a bad option.