Con Scanlon and the Eircom ESOT might want to cast a weather eye over the crisis enveloping the Swiss-based telecommunications service provider Carrier1 International.
The company - which is trying to build a fibre link network between the major cities of Europe - announced last week that its losses for the second quarter grew almost fivefold due to charges for bad debts, and added its founder was retiring as chief executive.
The reason the ESOT and Mr Scanlon might be interested is that John Hahn's Providence Equity Partners owns 58 per cent of the company, with the employees holding 16 per cent and the rest a free float.
Providence is set to take 40 per cent of Eircom and will be the biggest shareholder if - as seems almost certain - the Valentia consortium bid for the former Telecom ╔ireann succeeds.
The ESOT will own 29.9 per cent of the company, which will have debts of €2.2 billion.
Carrier1 International is feeling the full impact of a sharp slowdown in the telecommunications market and is scaling back its ambitious project to connect Europe's biggest cities with its own infrastructure.
The company said last week that net losses mushroomed to $59.4 million (€65.1 million) from a loss of $12.8 million in the same period a year ago, partly due to $16.8 million in bad debt expenses.
The company has had its credit rating slashed by Moodys and capital expenditure was cut to $43.8 million in the second quarter from $109.2 million in the first.
Carrier1 International said it would announce a successor to president and chief executive Stig Johansson within 30 days, and plans a strategic business review in view of tougher market conditions.
If Mr Scanlon wants to know what his new best friends - the US leveraged buy-out houses - are really like and how they will behave in a tight spot, he should observe the blood letting that is now expected at Carrier1 International.
He might also ask himself how Providence let Carrier1 get into the sort of mess that it now finds itself enveloped in and what this might mean for its stewardship of Eircom.
