Another barrage of apparently grim news from an already weakened TMT grouping brought a fresh dose of selling to London's equity market yesterday.

The latest bad news came from the technology and telecoms sectors with Marconi taking the highly unusual decision to request the suspension of trading in its shares pending a trading statement and following news of the sale of its medical systems business to Philips Electronics.

Trading in Marconi shares was suspended all day. And, if the doom-laden stories circulating in the market prove correct, dealers say the Marconi share price could halve when they return to the market.

Traders were scratching their heads trying to remember when, if ever, trading in a FTSE 100 constituent had been suspended for a full session.

Confidence in the telecoms sector was further drained by overnight news of another huge placing of shares in Vodafone, the mobile phones giant, as Banco Santander Central Hispano, the Spanish bank cut its holding in the UK group to 1.62 per cent, from 2.71 per cent.

The Banco Santander share sale is the third large block to be unloaded in the past two weeks, after Telia of Sweden and KPN of the Netherlands sold their holdings in the UK group.

With Wall Street closed for Independence Day and dealers unable to trade in Marconi, it was a subdued session in the market, apart from a handful of pre-market trades which saw one sale of 500,000 Marconi shares at 245p.

Sentiment was badly damaged by the Marconi scare which came hard on the heels of the Dimension Data profit warning and a long running sequence of bad news from the TMTs from both sides of the Atlantic.

The FTSE 100 worst performers table was overloaded with TMTs 16 out of the 20 poorest performers came from those areas. And analysts forecast more problems from those sectors.