Coopers & Lybrand

"Cyril Poidatz, who had been working at Cap Gemini, one of the top computer services companies where he had worked for ten years after beginning his career as an auditor at Coopers & Lybrand, joined the management team at Iliad in 1998. He was then 38 years old and one of the older members of the team. Today, he is the 418th wealthiest person in France with an estimated net worth of €73 million according to Challenges magazine's 2012 ranking. The following year, the technical team was strengthened with the addition of 23-year-old Rani Assaf as head of the IP and Telecom network, and Antoine Levavasseur, two years younger, in charge of the platform and Free's services. Both were recent graduates of the Engineering School of Information and Communication Technologies (EFREI), formerly known as the French School of Radioelectricity (EFR)."

"⁠Rainbow did work out, however, and spectacularly so. Between May 1984 and July 1987 it was as though fertiliser and warm rain had been applied to the newly seeded companies on the New Zealand Stock Exchange. Most flourished. Rainbow morphed from a small leisure company to a significant corporate player. The company that had been worth $6 million when it listed in 1984 was worth $600 million by July 1987. Along the way it bought bigger and bigger assets for higher and higher prices. Talented people joined Rainbow including Gary Lane, who had been a partner at Coopers & Lybrand, and Lloyd Morrison from the broking firm Ord O’Connor Grieve. As the share price rose, the company would place more shares to raise more capital to fund more acquisitions. It also took on more and more debt.⁠"

"Gibbs’ primary contribution came in mid-1991, a year after Sky was launched. As Coopers & Lybrand had predicted, the fledgling business was taking longer to get established than initially estimated; the New Zealand economy was in deep recession and subscribers were signing on in a trickle rather than the steady flow that Heatley had confidently anticipated. The business was losing $1 million a week, which gained everyone’s attention. Heatley hadn’t lost confidence but admitted that he’d underestimated the startup costs. He remembers Gibbs calling him up at home one evening and saying, ‘Craig, you promised me that if I put a little bit of money in Sky I’d have lots of fun; I’ve now got more than a little bit of money in it, and it’s no fun at all.’ Their solution was to bring in more investors to contribute around $100 million in fresh capital. They started talking to Gibbs’ partners at Telecom, Bell Atlantic and Ameritech, sowing the idea that this could be a useful experiment for them. In the United States telecommunications companies were barred from investing in cable television, so New Zealand would provide an opportunity for them to explore potentially interesting synergies between the two industries. Soon a consortium was drawn together comprising Bell Atlantic, Ameritech and two cable companies, Time Warner and TCI, and they began negotiating an appropriate price for 50 per cent of Sky."