Running out of cash, MobileStar had entered into negotiations for a major investment from what one executive described as a publicly traded telecommunications company.
The firm invested $1.3 billion last year and this spring in minority investments in six publicly traded telecommunications companies: Globix, ICG Communications, RCN, Rhythms NetConnections, Teligent and Viatel.
Then, at the peak of the market in late 1999 and early 2000, Hicks, Muse invested $1.3 billion in six publicly traded telecommunications companies: Globix, ICG Communications, RCN, Rhythms NetConnections, Teligent and Viatel.
Both lost large amounts of money for investors on stakes in publicly traded telecommunications firms, the end of their firms as major private equity players.
Enron also owns a new business that trades telecommunications bandwidth, or high-speed long-distance capacity, but that investment has produced giant losses as the steep downturn in that industry.
The home page blurb described Alfa Equity as "one of Russia's largest privately owned financial-industrial conglomerates, with interests in oil and gas, mining, commercial and investment banking, asset management, insurance, retail trade, telecommunications, media, water supply and water disposal, as well as other industrial-trade and special-situation investments".
It later said it was doing the same thing with "bandwidth," creating new ways to trade telecommunications network capacity.
From 1998 to 1999, Mr. Berman was Vice Chairman and a director of Executone Information Systems, a publicly traded telecommunications company, and from 1995 to 1999, Mr. Berman was Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Hospitality Worldwide Services, Inc., a publicly traded company that served the hospitality sector worldwide.
For example, consider Anderson Enterprises, a publicly traded telecommunications company with 100,000 shares outstanding.
Oftel, the telecoms regulator, pays members of its Advisory Body on Fair Trading in Telecommunications £375 a day.
