BT Wireless poaches Exel finance chief in preparation for demerger

British Telecom has beefed up the board of its mobile phone unit, BT Wireless, by poaching David Finch from Exel Group to be chief finance officer.

British Telecom has beefed up the board of its mobile phone unit, BT Wireless, by poaching David Finch from Exel Group to be chief finance officer.

Mr Finch, who is currently finance director at Exel, will take up his new role in later this summer. BT is planning to demerge BT Wireless from the group later this year and is in the process of building an executive board for the business, which should end up in the FTSE 100 index.

Earlier this month, David Varney, the former head of BG, was appointed chairman of BT Wireless with a mission to recruit a team. At the start of the week, Vivek Dev, BT Wireless's chief finance officer, was made chief operating officer with responsibility for network development and infrastructure sharing.

Separately, Pierre Danon, chief executive of BT's retail arm, is to present new research on 11 July stating that the phone giant's rate structure, when combined with television packages from ONdigital or BSkyB, is cheaper than bundled TV-phone packages offered by NTL and Telewest.

The auditors Deloitte & Touche will provide the research which was commissioned by BT. BT has lost millions of customers to cable, which offers bundled TV-phone packages from £9.60 compared with £10 for a phone line from BT.

BT Retail said it planned to shed 2,000 jobs in the current year, through normal attrition rather than redundancies, as part of its £850m cost-cutting programme.

BT also said it was rethinking its high-speed internet strategy and was considering raising prices for its ADSL service. Shares in BT closed down 3.5 per cent, or 15p, at 410p.