Vodafone Still Exposed to Egypt Risks a Year After Uprisings

Over five days early last year, as the revolution escalated in Cairo, Hatem Dowidar, the chief executive officer of Vodafone Group Plc (VOD)’s Egypt unit, yielded to the regime’s demands to issue pro-government text messages.

While he objected, his focus was to keep his damaged operation running amid the chaos and he considered the “public safety” messages to be harmless. The instructions kept coming until Feb. 2 when security forces ordered Vodafone to announce the time and place of a demonstration in support of then President Hosni Mubarak. That day, clashes between protesters and government loyalists in Tahrir Square hours later resulted in the deaths of 20 people.

A year on, Vodafone is seeking an amendment to the law to curb the state’s control and to protect its Egypt investments. With the European Union set to publish a report this week demanding the company learn from its “past mistakes” when it gave in to Mubarak’s demands, Vodafone’s response and its crisis planning are still under the spotlight, Bloomberg says.

“We’re lobbying very hard,” Dowidar said in an interview from Cairo during the anniversary of the protests. When demonstrators took to the streets a year ago, “no one in Egypt, not the previous regime, not the revolutionaries, not us, was prepared for what was happening.”