Perhaps the only reason he hasn’t gone already is that there is no one obvious to replace him. The board has decided on its strategy, and Mr Wallace is the man to implement it, he insists. Mr Nash for one has every confidence in his abilities to do so The City does not. With the share price at its present depressed level, the company is worth less than the value of its £2.2bn cash mountain.If you think that must make it good value, you haven’t yet read yesterday’s shocker of a financial statement. Where to start with the litany of bad news? That there is a further, massive asset impairment charge and goodwill write-down is the least of it.

The company also admits that it will cost another £800m to get C&W Global, the group’s international telecommunications network, to cash flow positive. This is not achieved by growing revenues, mind, but by shedding costs, revenues and capital expenditure commitments in equal measure. A much shrunken business emerges the other side, if it emerges at all.On top of that there is a near £400m pension fund deficit requiring an immediate cash injection of £47m. And if that were not bad enough, it turns out that the company has also horribly underestimated its property and other lease commitments.

This potential liability inexplicably leaps from a previously reported £897m to an astonishing £2.2bn, of which only £450m is provided for in yesterday’s numbers.Of course, a liability on this scale would only materialise if the company closed all its operations down, but it does help explain why the surgery at Global is no bigger than it is. It may cost more to close these businesses down than to keep them running at a loss. That cash mountain looks more of an illusion by the day.Mr Wallace blames his predicament on the collapse of the telecoms market, but he also bears a heavy responsibility for key strategic and operational errors. After an outstanding start, during which he achieved some excellent top of the market prices for C&W assets, Mr Wallace lost the plot by ploughing the money back into Global.The idea seemed logical enough – that in the internet age C&W would carve itself a cutting edge role as a provider of value added communications solutions to international business.