Eircom's chief says he's achieved his goals, writes Arthur Beesley, Senior Business Correspondent

With only days to go at the helm of Eircom, Phil Nolan is playing golf this weekend after unveiling his final quarterly results with the telcoms group. Within the next fortnight, Babcock & Brown will complete its €2.36 billion takeover of Eircom. Once that happens, Nolan will be on his way.

Not that he has much to say about his next port of call. Nolan has already made clear his desire to chair a FTSE 100 player but he is silent on how he might realise that ambition. "It's normal for anyone in business to aspire to the chairmanship of a big company," he says.

"I will probably work here and in the UK."

Nolan joined Eircom in January 2002 when Sir Anthony O'Reilly's Valentia consortium took the company private after it prevailed in a bitter takeover battle with Denis O'Brien. Before that came the company's tumultuous privatisation and the collapse of its share price, leaving hundreds of thousands of small investors nursing big losses.

By the time Nolan took over, the company had already encountered more controversy then than many corporate entities see in a lifetime. However, his own tenure as chief executive was characterised by yet more frantic corporate action.

Nolan was in charge when the company floated on the stock market for a second time in 2004, a move that came much sooner than anticipated when Valentia took charge.

This development was swiftly followed by its acquisition of the third mobile operator Meteor last year. Then came the botched takeover attempt by Swisscom, followed shortly after by the approach from Babcock.

"I didn't envisage so much corporate activity," he concedes.

If the residual bad feeling that still surrounds Eircom can be traced back to its privatisation in 1999, Nolan says that he has achieved his three objectives for the company.

"The first thing was to try to get on an even keel, the second was to get broadband started and the third was to re-enter mobile."

Thus Nolan says he leaves Eircom in good shape. Yesterday's results - the last under the ancien regime - show that Eircom's revenue rose 21 per cent to €483 million in the three months to June from €399 million in the same period last year.

Operating profits of €81 million contrast with €112 million last year, although earnings before interest tax depreciation and amortisation rose 9 per cent to €162 million when restructuring costs, non-cash pension charge and the property disposal costs are stripped out.

Meteor now boasts 700,000 subscribers while the number of broadband customers stood at 274,000 a week ago.

Of course Ireland fell to the bottom of EU league tables for broadband penetration during Nolan's time with Eircom.

He makes no apologies for that, stating that the upheaval in the telecom world after the dotcom collapse left many operators in a financial fix. "A lot of companies lost a lot money overpredicting the future," he says.

There have been many testy exchanges with the industry regulator, not to mention tension with the Government.

At a conference last year, Cabinet member Martin Cullen seemed to sum up political frustration with Eircom when he claimed it was Government action that led Eircom and other telecom groups to widen access to its broadband service.

"We forced you to get off your backside and do it," Cullen said then.

Nolan makes light of this. "People play to their constituencies. They have their own jobs to do. A lot of the debate about broadband could have taken place with more decorum and rationality," he says.

From Fermanagh, Nolan spent his career in Britain in senior roles at the oil giant BP and BG, the former British Gas. So how does Irish business compare?

"The informality here is noticeable in comparison," he says. "A lot more business relationships are more informal. Everybody knows everybody. It was a bit of a goldfish bowl. For me, it was a bit of a surprise to be so much in public."

If Nolan was never a man to actively court publicity, he describes the experience of running a national telcoms company as akin to a sportsman playing in a packed stadium. "We must be the most public private company there ever was," he says.

"You have to stay focused on what you have to do and try not to let other things distract you. I don't see businessmen as celebrities."

He says the most difficult time was when he joined the company. "From what you read about Eircom in the newspapers, you'd almost expect that the company was falling apart. I found that Eircom was in somewhat better condition than I expected."

A Babcock & Brown spokesman declined to comment yesterday on a Reuters report that said Eircom plans to issue a €350 million floating-rate high-yield bond to finance its takeover.

At the same time, Moody's credit rating agency provisionally assigned a Ba3 corporate family rating to BCM Ireland Finance, one of Babcock's acquiring vehicles, and a B2 rating on its senior unsecured notes.

The agency also provisionally assigned a Ba3 rating to the senior unsecured credit facilities of Babcock's other vehicle, BCM Ireland Holdings, and a B2 rating on its second-lien loan.