Neotel has been struck by three senior-level resignations just a week after parent company, India’s Tata Communications, announced that Neotel MD and CEO Ajay Pandey was being redeployed and would return to his native India.

TechCentral has established that chief marketing officer Jacky Humphries has left, effective 1 February. Also headed for the exit is Mukul Sharma, executive head of the MD and CEO’s office, who, like Pandey, is returning to India.

Sharma, who previously headed Neotel’s retail consumer division, was moved to the CEO’s office in April last year.

The third senior staffer to leave is human resources managing executive Siphiwe Ndwalaza, who had been involved in the restructuring and retrenchments programme underway at the operator.

Noedene Isaacs-Mpulo, a former chief operating officer at the State IT Agency, has been brought in by Neotel on a consulting basis to manage the restructuring process.

Neotel chief technology officer Angus Hay says the company is not prepared to comment on the resignations, saying they are part of the “ongoing restructuring process”.

“It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment,” Hay says, adding that details of the company’s new structure will be communicated to the media sometime in March.

The news of the senior-level departures comes six weeks after TechCentral broke the news that Neotel had notified staff that retrenchments were looming.

Neotel has blamed the weak global economy for the need to restructure the business and reduce its staff complement.

It’s expected that the restructuring and retrenchment programme will be concluded by the end of March.

A letter sent to staff in December, signed, ironically, by Ndwalaza, who is now leaving, said it had become “evident that a realignment and rightsizing of headcount” was required in order to ensure the company was “competitive in the marketplace” and able to “meet its targets and ensure an optimal cost-to-revenue ratio”.

Last week, Neotel announced that Pandey would return to Tata Communications in India after more than five years at the helm of the SA business. Pandey was responsible for establishing the Neotel operation and securing its funding. He will succeeded by Tata’s Sunil Joshi on 1 April.

Meanwhile, in an unrelated development, Neotel’s managing executive for regulatory affairs, Tracy Cohen, has been elevated to the newly created role of chief officer of corporate services.  — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral