17,000 shareholders begin action against Deutsche Telekom

Deutsche Telekom, the troubled ex-monopoly shedding tens of thousands of customers, is making history. This week 17,000 shareholders, represented by more than 800 lawyers, have begun a court action seeking some €80m (£65m) in damages because, they allege, DT overcooked its earnings prospects when it placed a third tranche of its equity on the stock market in 2000.

It is the biggest trial of its kind in German history - so big that Frankfurt's top civil court is holding it in a city hall capable of seating up to 800. (On Monday, day one of a case that could last several years, fewer than 100 were there.) And it is the first "model" case or class action under a new law, with an individual suing DT for €1.65m on behalf of the rest.

The case coincides with EU moves to promote collective consumer redress against companies, with Neelie Kroes, competition commissioner, last week publishing a white paper on her proposals to empower customers overcharged by cartels or firms abusing their dominance to sue for damages in "group" or "representative" actions. The EU is also struggling to produce more wide-ranging rules to allow consumers to mount cross-border group actions.

In Germany the gravamen of the case is that DT, in seeking to hype its stock as a "people's share," hid from would-be investors its plans to spend an overheated $35bn (£18bn) on US company Voicestream and the true value of property it planned to sale. Sold at up to €66.50, the share offering was 3.5 times oversubscribed and netted €15bn for the state. But the shares tanked in 2001, never recovered and are still worth only around €11 compared with a highpoint of €103.50 in early 2000.

In the litigious US, the home of class actions, DT has already settled a similar case for $120m but its lawyers have already rejected a similar deal for Germans, arguing they have to think of the 3 million other shareholders. And lawyers and investor lobbies say the prospects of winning are poor compared with the US case. But, in its pan-European ambitions, the EU says it is seeking to avoid the excessive litigation culture of the US where lawyers can win triple damages - and pocket up to 40% of the proceeds.

Kroes says she favours an "opt-in" system - under which complainants choose to join a group action - over the American "opt-out" system. Under the latter they are unidentifiedly "joined" unless they indicate otherwise. But the EU is at sixes and sevens over this.

Deborah Price, head of legal affairs at Which?, the consumer body that successfully sued retailer JJB Sports for damages after it was found guilty of overcharging for replica football shirts, says an "opt-out" system is the only viable way to win collective redress for consumers.

She tells me: "Nobody wants a US-style system so it won't happen ... But with an opt-in system you're just not going to get enough claimants to make the action viable ... It's going to be virtually impossible to bring an action because how do we identify the consumers who have been affected ... and it will cost tens, possibly, hundreds of thousands ... an opt-out is the only way to get it to work."

Desperately seeking Gloria

Suffering from green fatigue? Brussels certainly is. Hardly a day goes by without another "major" conference or seminar on climate change and/or depleted energy supplies, each one piling on the doomsday agony of the Stern report.

So, on Monday, at a roundtable organised by Friends of Europe in the ornate Bibliotheque Solvay, Shell set out its energy scenarios to 2050, provoking more alarm among the assembled guests. But Jeroen van der Veer, CEO, and Jeremy Bentham, head of its global business environment team, did at least lift some of the gloom.

Presenting two scenarios - one, Scramble, in which countries engage initially in a free-for-all rush to secure energy resources, and a second, Blueprint, in which cities and governments come together in coalitions to tackle economic growth, energy security and pollution, they opted for the latter - the first time Shell has taken such a position, including on the need for a global cap-and-trade emissions system.

They even found themselves in an ad hoc coalition with Claude Turmes, a Luxembourg Green MEP and energy expert, who endorsed many of their findings - even though he remains sceptical about Shell's demands for incentives to promote carbon capture and storage and alarmed by plans to extract oil from Canadian sand.

Turmes, who sat on the podium whereas he might have been gesticulating from the back of the hall five years ago, is a serious thinker but deft at comic relief. Shell, Bentham said, has moved in a decade from Tina (there is no alternative) to Tania (There are no ideal answers). Whoa, said Turmes, Tania means going nowhere. We need Gloria (Go for low-risk answers) - resource efficiency such as renewables.

And energy efficiency, of course. On Tuesday, EICTA, the body representing Europe's digital technology industry, set out its stall on how the sector - responsible for just 2% of CO2 emissions - can enable others to save energy and combat global warming. Much talk of flexi-working via broadband to reduce peak-hour traffic congestion, electronic reusable paper, smart buildings, enhanced street lighting, even of the "virtual" power station - using ICT to fine tune generation and distribution to grids, ease access for renewables such as wind and allow domestic micro-generators to feed into the network.

"Improving the efficiency of our products is not enough," said John Higgins, director general of EICTA's UK arm, Intellect. "We have to find ways to completely decouple economic growth from energy consumption." If only we could ... Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency, had chilled us on Monday in the end by warning that, even if the EU achieved its target of reducing greenhouse gases by 20% by 2020, that would be only 70% of China's emissions in a given year.