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Vodafone hires former EE boss Olaf Swantee after he quits Swiss telecoms group after shareholder spat

p53 SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - OCTOBER 29:  A general view of a Vodafone city store is seen on October 29, 2012 in Sydney, Australia. Vodafone Australia announced that it will shed jobs, believed to be up to 500, in an effort to curb costs as their customer base reduces, and the expense of updating the network to 4G is realised. Vodafone Australia has lost a million customers in the past two years, with patchy network coverage considered the main complaint. Vodafone Australia is co-owned by Vodafone plc in the UK, and Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa.  (Mark Kolbe/Getty)

Vodafone has hired the former boss of its biggest UK competitor to join its board.

Olaf Swantee was chief executive at EE, having risen through the ranks at Orange and merging it with T-Mobile.

That merger of the third and fourth biggest UK mobile operators created the business he renamed EE, or Everything Everywhere.

He stepped down when BT bought it and his commercial director Mark Allera took over.

Swantee had been tipped as a possible successor to BT chief executive Gavin Patterson before Philip Jansen got the job in 2019.

WATCH: Vodafone foresees post-crisis growth surge

The Dutchman, 55, will join as a non-executive director at Vodafone in July and become a member of its audit and risk committee, answering to committee chairman David Nish.

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After leaving EE in 2016, Swantee became chief executive of a Swiss company called Sunrise Communications.

Having overseen a successful transformation of the business following its IPO, he quit last year after a shareholder revolt blocked his plan to buy Liberty Global’s Swiss arm for $6.3 billion.

His appointment comes soon after Belgian Jean-Francois van Boxmeer took over as chairman. Boxmeer is former CEO of Heineken.

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