According to the CanWest report , the group is headed by former Nortel president, Robert Ferchat, now 74, and includes Ian Craig, who was chief marketing officer in the late 1990s and David Mann, who retired as vice-president in 2001. The report said that other ex-Nortel executives now in their 40s and 50s had been approached to take over the management.

Ferchat is nothing if not ambitious: in addition to reviving the moribund Nortel he hopes to use hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D tax credits - available only if the company is profitable and Canadian owned - to partially fund the building of a Canadian version of Australia's NBN - a high-speed Internet network to link businesses, schools, hospitals and other institutions across the country.

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