Engineer responsible for Bell-Med takeover appointed GO’s chief strategy chief

In a company announcement filed with the Malta Stock Exchange (MSE) early this morning by company secretary Francis Galea Salamone, the telecoms company revealed that Sammut’s new post would take place with effect as from 1 August 2010.

He graduated in engineering in 1989 from the University of Malta (UM) and obtained a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from Brunel University.

He started his career in the private sector with the Dowty Group following an assignment overseas within the aerospace industry.

Sammut joined MITTS in 1992, where he was responsible for the delivery and support of IT infrastructure services, as well as for the management and operations of Government’s data centres.

In 2001, he joined the Maltacom Group, GO’s precursor, to setup Innovate Limited.

Additional to the development of a state of the art data centre facility, his responsibilities at Innovate included business development and marketing.

Most recently at GO, Sammut held the position of Head International, Wholesale and Alliances. In this capacity he had been responsible for the company’s international carrier, fixed voice and mobile roaming services.

He was instrumental in GO’s acquisition of a 60% shareholding in Bell Med IT (BMIT) Limited, as had been revealed by sister paper Business Today on 4 March 2009.

In fact, Business Today had reported that Bell Med Limited, which had been operating as an ISP since 2003 covering mostly the corporate sector, had been in discussions with rival GO in order to transfer its ISP business to GO.

Thanks to the deal, GO had acquired a substantial slice of the business market that Bell Med has been serving since its inception.

In fact, Bell Med had been until then the ISP of choice for the majority of the lucrative e-gaming business in view of the fact that from the beginning, it had international connectivity both with GO and Vodafone, thus offering full redundancy in case of a failure of the connectivity of either GO or Vodafone.

Moreover, during his position as Head International, Wholesale and Alliances, Sammut had been responsible for developing and managing the company's data centre strategy in Malta and overseas.