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To: Mark Fowler who wrote (92149)	1/27/2000 7:44:00 PM
From: Slumdog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Local talent.................. Worldwide lends new boss $77.5M to buy stake Financial Post, with files from Bloomberg News VANCOUVER - Greg Maffei, the newly minted chief executive of Vancouver's Worldwide Fiber Inc., landed a $77.5-million (US) loan from the company in order to buy an 8% stake in it, documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reveal. In a separate development, the company continued its growth spurt, saying yesterday it is acquiring a 6,400-kilometre fibre-optic network linking 11 major European cities in a swap with Telia AB of Stockholm. Mr. Maffei, former chief financial officer for Microsoft Corp., officially joined Worldwide as CEO on Jan. 18. The $77.5 million loan "is an extraordinary amount of money to loan an executive," said Judy Fischer, managing director at Executive Compensation Advisory Services, an Alexandria, Virginia, company that does research on executive pay. "To attract a quality manager like that you've got to do something special," said Carl Blake, a debt analyst with TD Securities in New York. Worldwide has publicly traded debt. "The valuation he bought in at seems like a reasonable number." The purchase makes Mr. Maffei the third-largest shareholder in Worldwide, which is still a privately held company controlled by Vancouver construction giant Ledcor Industries Ltd. After Ledcor, the largest shareholder is a consortium of Wall Street investors. The filing also says the company may launch an initial public offering for its class A shares during the first half of this year. Worldwide said it will begin taking control of a portion of Telia's European network within the quarter and will complete the swap by the end of the year. The network spans seven European countries and includes London, Paris and Frankfurt. In exchange for the European network, Telia will receive some of the strands within Worldwide's 14,000-kilometre North American network. Michelle Gagne, Worldwide spokeswoman, said that while it looks like Worldwide is giving Telia longer stretches of cable, the deals are in fact roughly equal in terms of transmission capacity. Worldwide is getting more strands from within Telia's European cables than Telia is taking from within Worldwide's North American cables. "The fact that they can now get possession of the Telia assets sooner rather than letter allows them to be in business in that market sooner," said Mr. Blake. No cash value was placed on the transaction. The swap will be completed by the end of the year. The Telia deal boosts the planned extent of Worldwide's fibre-optic network to 57,000. Portions of that network are still under construction, including a transatlantic cable project. "This network acquisition now enables us to provide point-to-point service between North America and Europe via our trans-Atlantic network and capitalize on the explosive growth of the Internet in Europe," Mr. Maffei said in a statement.