Staff threaten KPNQwest shutdown
Published: 14 Jun 2002 13:55 BST
The efforts of liquidators to keep the KPNQwest network running could fail after all, as the put-upon staff issued a threat to walk out at the end of the business day on Friday.
Liquidators had gathered enough financial support and promises of money from customers to keep the network online till the end of June, but staff, realising that the network is unlikely to be sold as a unit, have issued an ultimatum: if a buyer is not found today, they will shut it down.
"We want a deal signed, sealed and delivered or we will shut down," said Graham Kinsey, one of the operators at the company's Brussels network centre, that have been working unpaid to keep the networking going since the company was made bankrupt last week, in an email quoted in the Financial Times and elsewhere.
The dissent appearts to come from staff on the Ebone European backbone, which was bought by KPNQwest earlier this year. Reportedly, 350 Ebone staff have been working without pay for the last week: the last straw for them was a reported move by the auditors to cut that number to 40.
Unless the staff are bluffing, a shutdown is a real possibility, as there is no expectation that the network can be sold on terms acceptable to them. The company's advice to its major customers has been to move to other suppliers, but this would vastly reduce the company's value to any buyer.
The liquidators in the Netherlands, and Bear Stearns, the bank in charge of the process, have not yet commented on this new development, but they appeared unprepared for this turn of events. They claim to have received around 40 bids for "all or part" of the network. However, no observers expect anyone to bid for the whole network, as every other service provider claims to have more than enough capacity for its current needs.
The liquidators have planned to examine the bids and offer "parcels" of the network to different providers next week. If it is turned off today, even this option may well be lost, as a "dark" network is worth much less than a working one.
Quoted in The Guardian, Kinsey said that smaller KPNQwest customers had expressed fears that a shutdown might put them out of business.
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