Wind Telecom
Italian telecommunications holding company owned by VimpelCom
Wind Telecom S.p.A. (formerly Weather Investments S.p.A.) was an Italian telecommunications holding company owned by the multinational VimpelCom Ltd., originally controlled by Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris.
It operated through its subsidiaries Orascom Telecom, Wind Hellas and Wind Telecomunicazioni until December 2017, when it merged into VimpelCom.
History
In June 2005, the company, named Weather Investments, bought Wind Telecomunicazioni, the third largest Italian mobile phone operator. The total value of the transaction was €12.1 billion.
Also in June 2005, 50% plus 1 share of Orascom Telecom was transferred to Weather Investments.
In 2007 the company acquired the Greek mobile carrier TIM Hellas from Apax Partners and Texas Pacific Group and rebranded it Wind Hellas in a deal worth €3.4 billion (£2.4 billion STG). Unfortunately, the Greek crisis brought the carrier in deep financial troubles, forcing Sawiris to sell the assets of the holding company (Weather Finance III) to a group of creditors, the SSN Ad-Hoc Committee. The transaction has been completed in December 2010.
In early 2008 the company acquired the license to operate mobile services in North Korea under the name Koryolink making history by being the first mobile operator there.
In January 2011, the company decided to change its name to Wind Telecom., due to the intention to bring a new image to the group, focusing to the strong points as leading subject in telecommunications and capitalizing all the value and success achieved by the "Wind" brand in recent years, as declared by Khaled Bichara.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Wind Telecom” is italian telecommunications holding company owned by VimpelCom. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Wind, Telecom and Italian, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “italian telecommunications holding company owned by VimpelCom” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2553238. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2017, 2005, 2007 and 2010.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
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Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Wind Telecom”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Wind Telecom primary sources, Wind Telecom archive and Wind research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wind Telecom” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.