Dutch incumbent telecoms operator KPN has announced that Maximo Ibarra resigns as CEO. According to Bloomberg, Ibarra will run Sky Italia.
He has given notice of termination of his contract, effective 30 September 2019.
With regards to Ibarra’ decision to step down, rumors have been circulating in the Italian press that Sky Italia has earmarked Ibarra as a possible CEO. Prior to joining KPN, he was a senior executive of the Italian telecom company Wind Telecom, where he led a major merger with CK Hutchison (3 Italia) in 2016.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported this morning Iberra is leaving for Italy to run Comcast Corp.’s Italian pay-TV unit, according to people familiar with the matter.
In a press statement this morning, KPN just said Maximo Ibarra resigns for pressing family reasons and will move back to Italy where he will take up a new executive position. He will continue the next three months to work towards an effective transfer of his duties to a successor, yet to be identified.
His resignation is unrelated to the network outage experienced yesterday, when the biggest outage in memory has hit telecom services in the Netherlands, prompting police to send duty officers into the streets with emergency services numbers out.
The outage started with the backbone at KPN, but has reached to other providers using KPN’s network. KPN acknowledged its fixed-line and mobile networks were down and the outage was ongoing after several hours.
Maximo Ibarra said in a statement about his resignation: “I have been with KPN since 2017, and appointed CEO in 2018. I regret the timing, but family reasons gave me no choice. I will dedicate myself the coming months to secure a seamless transfer to my successor.”
Duco Sickinghe, chairman of the Supervisory Board: “The Supervisory Board regrets but respects Maximo’s decision and accepts his resignation. The company is in good shape and is well on track to deliver on its strategy. We are in the process of identifying the right successor to Maximo. We wish Maximo all the best in his future endeavors.”
