FT : How the UK’s telecoms industry became a billionaire’s playground

How the UK’s telecoms industry became a billionaire’s playground
Xavier Niel and Sunil Mittal are poised to shake up Vodafone and BT after placing big bets on the UK’s major operators

In early July, one of Xavier Niel’s bankers boarded a flight to the United Arab Emirates with a simple instruction: find out whether Vodafone’s largest shareholder, Emirati telecom group e&, was willing to sell.

A week later, the deal was done.

Last Friday’s announcement that the French billionaire had spent £4.4bn to acquire e&’s 16.2 per cent stake propelled Vodafone’s shares up by 12 per cent. Investors are betting that Niel will drive greater cost-cutting, help Vodafone grow its share of the retail market and ultimately boost its profit margins.

Niel, whose discount mobile and broadband provider Iliad upended the French market, is the third industry tycoon to invest in the UK’s telecoms sector in little over two years.

India’s “telecoms tiger” Sunil Bharti Mittal paid £3.2bn for a 24.5 per cent stake in BT in 2024. That came shortly after Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim acquired a 3 per cent stake in the same company.

Provided Niel gains regulatory clearance for his purchase, the chief executives of Vodafone and BT — Margherita Della Valle and Allison Kirkby respectively — will both have demanding industry heavyweights marking their homework as they attempt far-reaching overhauls of the companies they lead.

At BT, Mittal is already pushing Kirkby to move faster on rolling out fibre networks and maximising the potential of its three consumer brands: BT, EE and Plusnet.

After Niel’s stake purchase, which may also be subject to UK national security clearance, analysts expect the man who aggressively disrupted the French market to pressure Della Valle to slash costs.

He has form. Latin American operator Millicom, in which Niel owns a 46 per cent stake, told analysts that after acquiring Telefonica’s former businesses in Ecuador, Uruguay, Colombia and Chile over the past year, it cut the workforce by about 30 per cent at each company.


At Sweden’s Tele2, in which Niel holds a 19 per cent stake, staff numbers were cut by roughly 15 per cent last year.

“This could potentially be a transformational change for Vodafone,” said James Ratzer, analyst at New Street Research. “Everything is on the table: aggressive cost reductions — given his track record — will be plan A and M&A will be plan B. He will keep management on their toes,” Ratzer added.

Vodafone is already beginning to make some of the changes Niel is expected to demand.

The FTSE 100 company, which employs some 91,000 people, announced plans in May 2023 to cut 11,000 jobs globally by 2026. It appointed Pilar López as its new finance chief last year in part because of her perceived ability to cut costs, according to a person familiar with the decision. 

One reason Vodafone and BT appeal to Niel and Mittal is their depressed share prices. The London-listed groups have underperformed European peers including Deutsche Telekom, Orange and Telecom Italia over the past decade. Like other UK companies, they have suffered from sustained capital outflows from the London stock market.


Niel has long had his eye on the UK’s largest mobile operator. He previously held a 2.5 per cent stake in Vodafone and has regularly considered taking a larger position, according to people familiar with his thinking.

The decision to invest now was partly because Della Valle has already done some of the hard yards of a multiyear turnaround effort, according to people familiar with the deal. 

Since being promoted to the top job in 2023, Della Valle has sold Vodafone’s struggling businesses, such as those in Spain and Italy. Meanwhile the company has bolstered its position in its strongest markets, most notably with the acquisition of CK Hutchison’s Three in a deal that consolidated the UK’s mobile market from four operators to three.

Niel believes that Della Valle’s changes have improved Vodafone, which he once dubbed “too fat”, but that there is still more to be done. The tycoon wants the company to do more to maximise the potential of its brand with consumers and exploit its global reach, which extends to more than 20 countries, according to people familiar with his thinking.

The billionaire was also optimistic that regulators in Brussels would approve in-market consolidation on the continent in the wake of the UK deal, they added.

A telecoms industry executive said they expected Niel to push Della Valle to find a deal to consolidate the German mobile market from four to three players, similar to its UK move.

Vodafone has considered making an acquisition in Germany but has not yet made any decision on any move to acquire a rival, according to a person familiar with the matter. Vodafone declined to comment. A representative for Niel also declined to comment.

By piling into Vodafone when it is midway through an overhaul, Niel has mirrored the timing of Mittal’s move on BT. The tycoon behind India’s Bharti Airtel first invested after Kirkby laid out her plans in May 2024 to cut costs and refocus the former UK state monopoly on its home market.

Since then, Mittal, who subsequently took a seat on BT’s board, has pushed Kirkby to speed up her turnaround. Since his investment, BT has accelerated cost-cutting, expanded its Openreach fibre network and agreed to merge its struggling international unit with that of Verizon.

While Kirkby’s changes have focused more on operational improvements, Della Valle’s overhaul has been more structural, which analysts say will leave Niel plenty of room to push on cost-cutting. His immediate focus is examining Vodafone’s IT outsourcing, according to people familiar with his thinking.

Before Niel can exert any influence at Vodafone, however, he must pass a regulatory examination which could take the best part of a year. One aspect that may concern EU regulators is Niel’s controlling stake in Irish operator Eir, a rival of Vodafone Ireland.

In addition to regulatory checks, a UK national security review is also likely under legislation that gives the government power to scrutinise acquisitions in 17 key areas of the economy, including communications and data infrastructure.

If cleared, he will then be able to push for a board seat, although no decisions have yet been taken on whether he will do so, according to people familiar with Niel’s thinking.

Yet the mere presence of a powerful industry disrupter, like Mittal at BT, will cast a long shadow over Vodafone’s central London headquarters.

“I’m sure that Vodafone will see some opportunities here,” said Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis. “But there will be nervousness too.”

FT : ‘Surveillance Chic’: can Meta make its smart glasses a viable fashion acces

‘Surveillance Chic’: can Meta make its smart glasses a viable fashion accessory?
Efforts to bring AI glasses to a broader demographic via a partnership with Kylie Jenner appear to have backfired

Meta’s smart glasses, which allow users to record anything they see, have stirred debate since their release in 2023, including worries about privacy and covert surveillance. Civil society groups, government regulators and consumers have all raised concerns about the company’s plan to use facial-recognition software, as well as its tests of a prototype that could record video and audio of the wearer’s every moment.

Late last month, Meta made a bold move to change the perception of its AI-powered tech accessory by enlisting uber-influencer Kylie Jenner, who showed off a new, more stylish version of the glasses in sleek photos posted to her Instagram, where she has roughly 382mn followers. The glasses, which are called Starfire Kylie Edition and retail for £359, were co-designed by Jenner and were presented at an influencer-heavy event in New York.

With the launch, Meta is following a well-known playbook whereby tech gadgets appealing to a niche segment of the market are transformed, with the help of marketing, redesign and celebrity ambassadors, into fashionable lifestyle accessories sought after by a cross-section of shoppers.

In an interview with the fashion publication Glossy, Eva Chen, the vice-president of fashion at Meta, said that the glasses had previously “stood out to show you were wearing tech on your face”. Now, they come in 26 styles and are meant “to blend into and be a part of your personal style”.


The collaboration is also a way to deflect scrutiny, claims Catharina Doria, an AI ethicist and the founder of The AI Survival Club, a book club and community focused on critical AI literacy.

“What they’re trying to do is to minimise conversations about surveillance and being a technology that can be used for a lot of harm, and trying to make these Meta glasses look cool and fun,” Doria says. “When it’s a fashion statement, you don’t criticise the technology. You’re more focused on the looks than the content of it.”

“The other ones, they were ugly,” she continues. When people saw them, they automatically thought, “What’s the purpose of this, if not to record? You really focused on the action.” She adds that, with the new glasses, the focus is on “how cute it looks now that it has a little crystal on the side”.

But instead of sparking excitement, the launch has faced backlash. Commentators online dubbed the move “surveillance chic” and called the glasses creepy.


Influencers who, after the launch, touted the glasses on social media were met with commenters’ accusations of selling out and enabling “a surveillance state”. Diet Prada, a popular fashion insider account on Instagram, added its two cents with a carousel of tongue-in-cheek remarks, including one that described Meta’s glasses as “a more ‘stylish’ way for strangers to harass and record you in public”.

On her Substack, stylist and fashion editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson called out guests at Meta’s launch event: “Insane how many of y’all let meta take pictures of you at their party wearing their newest covert cop cam sunnies! Fascism chic for summer!”

Meta did not respond to requests for comment. 

Despite the controversy on the use and capabilities of smart glasses, Meta’s AI glasses, which it produces with EssilorLuxottica, sold 7mn units last year. Competition has also heightened since 2023, with Snap releasing a pair of augmented reality glasses last month and Google and Apple drawing up their own versions. Alibaba, Xiaomi, Huawei, Tencent and Baidu have also invested heavily in similar products.

In this context, and despite the initial backlash to the launch, 28-year-old Jenner, a member of the Kardashian-Jenner clan, could give Meta a leg up. Her commercial influence has been proved time and time again — for example in 2018, when a social media post about her dissatisfaction with Snapchat was followed by a plunge in the company’s shares by as much as 8.4 per cent, or roughly $1.6bn of its market valuation.

“The Kardashian family defines what is cool and what is not,” Doria says. “Whatever they sell, sells in one second. They have the power to sway culture.”

Jenner is also an ideal ambassador for reaching new customers, especially women who have been targeted with the release of more stylish and wearable tech.

Companies have made a concerted push into fashion spaces in recent years. Yahoo, Apple and Instagram have all sponsored the Met Gala in the past decade. This May, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg both attended the glamorous annual fashion event in New York, and OpenAI, Meta and Amazon purchased tables, which start at $350,000.

Sarah Saska, a sociotechnologist and co-founder of Feminuity, a strategy consulting firm, explains that women are a major driving force in tech adoption.

“The dirty secret in Silicon Valley, in Big Tech writ large, any product, any new innovation doesn’t go mainstream and become normalised until it’s adopted by women”, Saska says.

“The iPod was just a gadget for music fiends until it became a fashion accessory,” she continues. The iPod silhouette campaign is a noteworthy example of technology breaking through to the masses by foregrounding coolness and lifestyle and removing tech specs in advertising.

“We see the same thing with fitness trackers,” Saska adds. “They entered the market as really nerdy hardware until they became branded as an aesthetic lifestyle that’s tied to wellness and even domesticity.”

She believes a similar “feminisation of AI” is under way. Campaigns to make AI more appealing to women by tying it to beauty, to motherhood, to wellness or lifestyle brands have multiplied alongside the rise in negative perceptions of AI in media, owing to its environmental costs, use in the military or job losses.

Critics including Saska and Doria believe that Meta’s use of Jenner’s image to appeal to a female audience is hypocritical, given that smart glasses have become a tool for capturing videos of unsuspecting women in public.

These videos, which are often posted to specialised social media accounts run by “manfluencers”, show women who have been filmed by male strangers without their permission while sunbathing, working out at the gym or standing on the street. The videos can attract millions of viewers along with derisive, offensive and inappropriate comments.

Though the glasses have a white LED light that switches on when recording, users have said it’s hard to see in daylight, and that it can be covered with a sticker so that many people, unaware such glasses even exist, simply do not notice it.

Janaya Walker, the interim director of the End Violence Against Women coalition, said in a statement that Meta’s collaboration with Jenner seemed calculated to appeal to the “same female audiences whose privacy and safety are undermined by the expansion of wearable technologies”.

Whether the risks to personal privacy will sway shoppers against buying AI glasses such as Meta’s remains to be seen. But Doria says that even people who believe they have nothing to hide should be wary. “Data companies are aggregating data to make life-altering decisions about your life, like if you can get credit to get a loan from a bank.”

At the end of the day, she says, “We all have the right to privacy.”

FT : Rothschild profits drop as banker bonuses eat into higher deal fees Long-aw

Rothschild profits drop as banker bonuses eat into higher deal fees
Long-awaited M&A recovery lifts revenues but also pushes up pay at UK investment banking arm

Rothschild’s UK investment bank paid out higher bonuses last year, eating into fees it generated in a recovering deals market and dragging profits lower.

NM Rothschild & Sons, the UK investment banking arm of Rothschild & Co, reported an 18 per cent drop in pre-tax profits to £84.9mn in 2025 despite an increase in revenues, according to accounts filed at Companies House.

Global advisory fees at the British arm of the two-century-old bank rose 8 per cent to £456.7mn in the period.

But the increase in revenues was outstripped by a 12 per cent jump in expenses, which the bank attributed to higher variable compensation that it said was “largely due to the strong revenue performance”.

The results highlight how the long-awaited recovery in mergers and acquisitions has begun to lift revenues for investment banks, while also pushing up pay as firms compete to retain and reward dealmakers.

NM Rothschild advised on a £5.3bn deal in which Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský bought Royal Mail and which completed in 2025. It also represented Spectris, the London-listed engineering group, in its £4.8bn takeover by US private equity firm KKR last year.

The deals followed a prolonged period in which UK dealmaking was subdued by higher interest rates and economic uncertainty.

NM Rothschild employed 945 staff on average during 2025, meaning average pay per employee was equivalent to about £312,000, including bonuses.

Staff costs at the UK investment bank climbed almost a tenth last year to £364.1mn, with the bank paying out £294.9mn in fixed and variable remuneration during the period.

The group said its banker remuneration package includes deferred bonuses, which are typically paid up to three years after they are awarded on the condition that bankers remain employed at Rothschild.

Boutique advisers such as Rothschild, Centerview and Evercore have cemented their position in the UK M&A market, competing successfully with larger Wall Street and City of London rivals to win mandates on some of the country’s biggest deals.

NM Rothschild, which is led by chief executive Robert Leitão who also sits on the board of Manchester United football club, was founded in 1811 by Nathan Mayer Rothschild, becoming the British arm of the banking dynasty.

The bank said in its annual report that it expected the dealmaking momentum seen during the second half of last year to continue into the first six months of 2026.

While a surge in large deals drove a record $2.8tn in global dealmaking in the first half, the number of smaller acquisitions fell as the US-Iran war created market volatility and AI threatened to disrupt companies’ business models.

Rothschild’s mandates so far this year have included acting as the lead financial adviser to Associated British Foods on its plan to demerge Primark from its food business, breaking up its conglomerate structure after 65 years.

Rothschild & Co declined to comment.

FT : Spain begins Gibraltar airport checks as Brexit reaches the Rock Troubled E

Spain begins Gibraltar airport checks as Brexit reaches the Rock
Troubled EU entry system will be turned on from Wednesday, with UK territory in effect becoming part of Schengen zone

Britons flying to Gibraltar from the UK will have to go through the EU’s contentious new electronic border system from this week, as the after-effects of Brexit finally reach the rocky outpost.

Gibraltar — which has Britain’s only terrestrial border with the European continent — will become a de facto part of the EU’s Schengen free-movement area after midnight on Wednesday, when a new UK-EU treaty comes into force.

The agreement sealed last year meshes the UK’s divisive departure from the EU with the bloc’s troubled implementation of a new entry/exit system (EES), which requires fingerprint and face scans and has led to lengthy queues at some airports.

“I am concerned it could happen,” Fabian Picardo, Gibraltar’s chief minister, told the FT, referring to the long lines.

The EES came fully into force in April, but its rollout has been marred by technical issues and delays. Some countries have suspended part of the checks.

Gibraltar, which has a strategic position on the Mediterranean, was left out of a post-Brexit UK-EU trade deal that came into force at the end of 2020.

The negotiations over its status — between the UK and Gibraltar on one side and Spain and the EU on the other — lasted for three-and-a-half years and the parties finally struck a deal in June 2025.

The Spanish government, which does not recognise British sovereignty over Gibraltar, won control of EES checks in the treaty negotiations. It said its systems for passport, fingerprint and face scans were working “optimally” and will be deployed in the territory immediately.

An EU official said Spain was a “role model” when it came to implementing the system. “Among the countries with a lot of non-EU visitors, Spain is doing very well,” the official said.

Gibraltar’s airport receives about 300,000 passengers a year. All flights come from the UK and nearly 90 per cent of arrivals use the Rock as a route to holidays in southern Spain, according to the Gibraltar government.

Picardo said: “We tend to get one A320 [aircraft] every hour or so, so there should be time to clear the 140, 150 passengers before you have a build-up.”

The EES will be used for UK and other non-EU citizens arriving in Gibraltar, but Gibraltar’s 38,000 residents have been exempted from the system under the new UK-EU treaty. Picardo noted that passengers who have registered with EES elsewhere will move more quickly through the system.

However, the start of school holidays in Britain could add complications. Children under 12 cannot have their fingerprints collected, but still need to take a photo under the new checks. At Spanish airports with too few border police on duty, flights with large numbers of British families have caused queues.

“This will be a work in progress for us as we start this operation,” Picardo said.

Gibraltarian officials will carry out their own passport checks. But the UK and Gibraltar accepted having Spanish border police at the airport as the price for removing all passport controls on the adjacent Gibraltar-Spain land border, a key win for the British Overseas Territory’s economy.

Had no deal been reached, Gibraltar faced the prospect of a hard land border with full passport checks and hours-long queues. That would have strangled its economy, which depends on 15,000 workers who commute from Spain every day, and hobbled Gibraltarians who drive into Spain for shopping and leisure.

But Picardo bristled at the suggestion that Spanish border police represented “boots on the ground” in Gibraltar, something he had long insisted was unacceptable.

He said they would work at a joint facility added to the airport — he has dubbed it the “Schengen shack” — which will be half in Gibraltar and half in Spain. “The boots will be contained within that, which is exactly what we set out to do.”

Juan Franco, mayor of La Línea de la Concepción, the Spanish border town next to Gibraltar, said it was inevitable that Spanish police would have a role. “Everyone has to give a little. And obviously, if you’re going to enter the Schengen area via a land border with Spain who is going to check you? The Lithuanian police?”

As the hours to the end of the land frontier ticked down, there was no sign of a pre-emptive relaxing of the rules on Monday.

A tearful Spanish woman pleaded with a UK border official to let her into Gibraltar, saying she had lost her ID card at the weekend but needed to get to work. “I promise I’ll get a new one later today and come with it tomorrow,” she said in Spanish.

“I don’t understand. I’m English,” the border official said. “You need your passport. You have to go back.”

FT : SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son slams opponents of AI Business leaders unwilling t

SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son slams opponents of AI
Business leaders unwilling to embrace technology ‘should play the role of spouse’, says controversial investor

Masayoshi Son has ridiculed opponents of AI for “spitting upwards” as the SoftBank billionaire predicted the technology would account for 20 per cent of global output by 2040.

Son told a room of executives at his annual SoftBank World event that condemning AI was the modern version of rejecting cars and aeroplanes.

“Those who dislike AI have essentially refused their own evolution,” he said. “Those who condemn AI are themselves spitting upwards.”

His comments came as the veteran investor inserts himself into the AI revolution through huge investments in Arm, OpenAI and other tech companies.

Yet investors are growing wary of SoftBank Group’s rising leverage and the possibility of delays to OpenAI’s initial public offering.

SoftBank has been attempting to build a role across data centre infrastructure, AI models, chips and robots in order to cement itself at the centre of what Son believes will be an evolution to superintelligence.

While there has been a public backlash over the perceived impacts of AI on employment, Son expressed his distaste for the hesitant — especially Japanese business leaders who failed to create new giants in the internet era.

“Modest presidents” who are not prepared to embrace AI to become number one in their industry within 15 years “should play the role of spouse”, he said.

“The most important thing for the president to say is ‘AI, AI, AI’.”

The 68-year-old expressed bullish views on the potential for AI to transform the global economy, predicting with confidence that it would account for $46tn of global GDP within 15 years and generate annual profits of half that figure.

To enable the rollout of AI, the Japanese investor estimated that 3 terawatts of data centres would be needed by 2040 to provide the computing power to run trillions of AI agents and billions of humanoid robots.

The figure is equivalent to about a third of total installed power capacity globally, according to the International Energy Agency’s estimates.

The SoftBank founder said gas-fired power generation would be needed to achieve that, but in the longer term, nuclear fusion would take its place.

Numerous start-ups and research programmes are working on fusion around the world, but none has demonstrated sustained power generation to date.


SoftBank’s energy arm was selected to deliver a $33bn gas-fired power plant in Ohio, a controversial project within the $550bn investment framework that Washington and Tokyo agreed last year in return for US President Donald Trump lowering tariffs on Japan.

SoftBank’s shares have risen 35 per cent so far this year but have come under pressure since peaking in June because of worries over the timing of OpenAI’s blockbuster listing.

NYT : Inside Israel’s Secret Operation to Cultivate Ahmadinejad The yearslong ef

Inside Israel’s Secret Operation to Cultivate Ahmadinejad
The yearslong effort to groom the former Iranian president as an intelligence asset culminated in a dramatic effort to take him to an Israeli safe house in the early days of the war. But the plan fell apart.

In early 2024, the rector of a university in Budapest received a startling request from a top Hungarian government official.

The official told the rector, Professor Gergely Deli, that Ludovika University of Public Service should hold a climate change conference and extend an invitation to an unlikely guest: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the widely reviled former president of Iran.

Even more shocking was the reason. The official told Mr. Deli that the conference was merely a front for Mr. Ahmadinejad to have secret discussions in Budapest with intelligence operatives from Israel, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s avowed enemy.

Mr. Deli knew that the invitation could tarnish both his own reputation and that of the university. But, he said in an interview, he believed he might be playing a role in saving lives.

“You have two enemies, and if these enemies want to talk with each other, then it’s best to do what you can to make them talk,” he said.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s 2024 visit to the university and a second one the following year were part of a yearslong Israeli effort to groom him as an intelligence asset who, when the time came, could be installed as Iran’s new leader, according to both American and Iranian officials familiar with the operation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive intelligence.

Recruiting Mr. Ahmadinejad was of such priority for Israel that the country’s then-spy chief David Barnea even traveled to the Hungarian capital in 2024 to meet with Mr. Ahmadinejad personally, according to former American officials. Soon afterward, they said, Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, notified the C.I.A. that it had been in contact with Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Israel’s decision to build a regime-change plan around Mr. Ahmadinejad is an extraordinary twist in the saga of the country’s relations with the former president, who was known for accelerating Iran’s nuclear program, calling regularly for the destruction of Israel and denying the Holocaust.

In recent years, according to American officials, Israel secretly paid money to Mr. Ahmadinejad for housing and travel, and Israeli operatives met him abroad on several occasions, including during his trips to Budapest.

The effort culminated in late February of this year — during the first days of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran — with an audacious operation to relocate the former leader, who had been living under strict surveillance in Tehran. The goal: to set in motion the plan to topple the current regime and install Mr. Ahmadinejad.

The plan failed.

On Feb. 28, an Israeli airstrike hit Mr. Ahmadinejad’s compound, targeting the building of his bodyguards and his armored vehicle. After the strike, according to four senior Iranian officials, a black Peugeot car arrived, picked up Mr. Ahmadinejad and whisked him away at high speed from the chaotic scene.

American and Iranian officials with knowledge of the operation said the car had been driven by Mossad operatives, who took Mr. Ahmadinejad to a secret safe house in Iran.

But the former Iranian leader was upset about the frantic rescue operation, and he appeared to be disillusioned about the Israeli plan to return him to power, according to people with knowledge of what occurred.

He eventually left the safe house under circumstances that are still unclear. Mr. Ahmadinejad was not seen in public again until last Monday, when he made a brief appearance at the funeral procession for the slain supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

His current status remains uncertain. But four senior Iranian officials said that Mr. Ahmadinejad was in the custody of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ intelligence wing, under house arrest now that Iran has learned about much of his interactions with Israel.

Israeli officials have not commented publicly about the plan to install Mr. Ahmadinejad as Iran’s leader, which was part of a broader attempt to topple the government in Tehran. Another element involved arming and training Iranian Kurdish opposition forces based in northern Iraq to cross into western Iran, hold territory there and eventually move toward the capital Tehran, an effort that never manifested.

The regime-change plan involved a “sequence of special operations, very, very unique, that was supposed to happen,” Tamir Hayman, a former head of intelligence for the Israeli Defense Forces, told the PBS talk show “Firing Line” in May, after The New York Times first revealed details of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s role in the plan. “And Ahmadinejad was part of that sequence.”

Mossad officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Ali Akbar Javanfekr, a spokesman for Mr. Ahmadinejad, declined to comment.

A post-presidential shift
As the president of Iran from 2005 to 2013, Mr. Ahmadinejad was the country’s most prominent hard-line politician. He spoke of eliminating Israel, and under his rule Iran restarted a program to enrich uranium, raising suspicions that it was pursuing a secret nuclear weapons program. Mr. Ahmadinejad ordered violent crackdowns on a nationwide uprising contesting his re-election in 2009, and, under his rule, the judiciary carried out mass executions of dissidents and jailed opponents and rivals.

But in the years after he left the presidency, Mr. Ahmadinejad tempered his views and toned down the anti-Israel rhetoric that had marked his time in office. He was often eager to show off his newly minted moderate side, granting interviews and giving speeches in which he opined on Iran’s pop music culture, criticized the country’s security forces for heavy-handed crackdowns and accused the ruling class of financial corruption.

He abandoned his signature oversize khaki windbreaker and began wearing tailored suits. He groomed his messy beard, appeared to get Botox treatment and began learning English.

In his office in Tehran, he held hourlong public meetings each morning to hear the grievances of ordinary people, some who came to him seeking help navigating government bureaucracy. On occasion, he wrote letters to government ministries recommending petitioners for loans. He traveled regularly around the country, meeting with supporters both in cities and rural provinces.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s relationship with the Iranian government was complicated. Senior leaders marginalized him and restricted his movements, yet they allowed him a seat alongside other senior officials on a high-level council that advises the supreme leader. He attended the council’s meeting in February, a few days before the war began.

Many in Iran saw cynical political motives in Mr. Ahmadinejad’s transformation, which they viewed as an attempt to burnish his populist credentials and distance himself from ruling officials. He retained a base of support among working-class Iranians, and his advisers were certain that his goal was to one day return to power.

“Ahmadinejad would not do this for money. He has money; he has a wide economic network. He would do it for power. He wants to be at the helm of power,” Abdolreza Davari, a former close associate and senior adviser of Mr. Ahmadinejad, said in a phone interview. The two men had a falling-out several years ago.

Mr. Ahmadinejad told a handful of his closest associates and confidants about his ambitions to become Iran’s future leader with the help of foreign powers, according to an associate in his close circle, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.

Mr. Ahmadinejad became disillusioned with the Islamic republic system after he was disqualified to run for president three times, the associate said, and concluded that he could not ascend to power as long as the current system remained in place.

He was concerned that, in the event of a war and regime change, Americans and Israelis would choose some opposition figure outside Iran who did not know the country and Iran would be destabilized, the associate said. He described himself to those around him as someone who could play the role of a reformer, like the former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, and said that if he came to power, Iran would recognize Israel and normalize relations as part of President Trump’s Abraham Accords, the associate said.

Israeli intelligence agencies were closely following the brewing rift between Mr. Ahmadinejad and the Iranian regime during this period, according to two Israeli defense officials familiar with intelligence assessments at that time. Of particular interest, the officials said, was Mr. Ahmadinejad’s growing resentment of Ayatollah Khamenei and other senior figures who had disqualified Mr. Ahmadinejad from running for president again.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s actions began to arouse suspicion within the intelligence branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, which is responsible for safeguarding the Islamic republic against foreign interference. That suspicion grew, according to two members of the Guards and an intelligence official familiar with the case, after Mr. Ahmadinejad began sending public letters in 2017 to Mr. Trump and later to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Mr. Trump lavished praise on both men.

After the Israeli strike this year that initially freed Mr. Ahmadinejad from surveillance by the Guards, Iran’s intelligence agencies began investigating and piecing together his connection to Israel, according to the four officials.

Overseas meetings
It is unclear when Israeli operatives first tried to recruit Mr. Ahmadinejad. Iranian officials said there was at least some contact during a 2023 trip that Mr. Ahmadinejad took to Guatemala to attend a conference focused on the environment. The invitation came from the government of Guatemala, a country that has closer diplomatic ties to Israel than most in Latin America.

Mr. Ahmadinejad almost did not make the trip, as he was stopped at the airport in Tehran by security forces who refused to issue him a boarding pass and allow him to leave the country.

He staged an hourslong sit-in at the airport, which became a public spectacle as he took photographs with ordinary Iranian travelers, airport and airline staff and posted updates on his social media pages.

Eventually, Iranian authorities allowed Mr. Ahmadinejad to board the plane and attend the conference.

“Some people told me not to travel to Guatemala; I told them my brother the minister of environment invited me,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said in one of the videos of the trip. “This is a very important country in Latin America.”

The following year, he made his first trip to Hungary to attend the Ludovika University conference, meeting in Budapest with Mr. Barnea, who led Mossad for five years, until last month.

Hungary, which was led at that time by the right-wing prime minister Viktor Orban, had perhaps closer ties to Israel than any other European nation, and Mr. Orban and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel made trips to each other’s countries. Mr. Netanyahu gave a speech of his own in April 2025 at Ludovika University, which presented him with a public service award.

Two months later, Mr. Ahmadinejad returned to Budapest, just days before Israel launched a war in Iran, a visit that was a cover for him to meet with Israeli intelligence operatives.

His Iranian bodyguards from the Guards’ Ansar unit, who accompanied Mr. Ahmadinejad on all his foreign travel, reported that, on at least two occasions, he had managed to shake off his security detail and disappear for long meetings during the June 2025 trip. In a report about the trip, the bodyguards said that they had confronted Mr. Ahmadinejad about his disappearances, and that he had told them he had been meeting with university professors, according to the two Iranian Guards members and one intelligence official.

At the university conference, the former Iranian president delivered a lecture in English, surprising attendees by abandoning the signature Quranic verse he had once recited at the beginning of every speech.

Dressed in a tailored dark blue suit, he spoke about “shared humanity” and a “changing world order,” offering his own views on how a new world could emerge, according to videos from the trip posted on his social media page.

He presented Mr. Deli, the university rector, with a copy of the Book of Kings, by the ancient Iranian poet Ferdowsi. Mr. Deli gave Mr. Ahmadinejad an emblem of the university.

In an interview last month, Mr. Deli said that, in extending an invitation to Mr. Ahmadinejad, he had played the role of a “strohmann” — German for “frontman” or “puppet.”

Until last week, Mr. Ahmadinejad had not been seen in public since late February, when he was whisked away from his Tehran home in the black Peugeot.

Last Monday, he made a brief, surprise appearance as part of Ayatollah Khamenei’s funeral procession. Videos of the procession showed Mr. Ahmadinejad, wearing a heavy jacket in the 90-degree heat, with a surgical mask pulled down to his chin. Iran’s two other living former presidents, Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami, were not invited and did not appear in any of the funeral ceremonies.

Mr. Ahmadinejad stood with his head down, not speaking, flanked on all sides by what appeared to be security guards.

>>> Biogen, Eisai win FDA approval for subcutaneous LEQEMBI initiation dosing in

Biogen, Eisai win FDA approval for subcutaneous LEQEMBI initiation dosing in early Alzheimer's disease
  • FDA approved a supplemental BLA for once-weekly LEQEMBI IQLIK subcutaneous injection as an initiation dose for adults with early Alzheimer's disease.
  • The autoinjector regimen is 500 mg once weekly as two 250 mg injections; the companies plan a U.S. launch in late August 2026.
  • Approval was supported by Phase 3 Clarity AD long-term extension data showing subcutaneous exposure equivalent to IV dosing, with expected comparable ARIA-E rates and a generally similar safety profile.
  • LEQEMBI IQLIK also can be used for maintenance dosing at 360 mg once weekly after 18 months of IV or subcutaneous treatment, and patients may switch between IV and subcutaneous administration.

>>> US After Hours Summary: TREX +4.6% as it realigns distribution network and g

After Hours Summary: TREX +4.6% as it realigns distribution network and guides higher; MBX -11.7% after it names new CEO and new CFO; PENG -6.7% on convertible notes offering

After Hours Gainers:

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: None

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to news: TREX +4.6% (realigns North American distribution network; Issues upside Q2 and FY26 revenue guidance; also names Specialty Building Products sole national distribution partner), RPAY +1.5% (board rejects Forager Capital's revised $5.25/sh proposal), BIIB +1.4% (FDA approves subcutaneous LEQEMBI initiation dosing in early Alzheimer's disease), EPRX +1.1% (executive leadership team changes), DHT +1.1% (provides Q2 business update), LHX +1.1% (wins U.S. Space Force contract for 18 missile-tracking satellites), CMG +0.1% (opens first Mexico restaurant)

After Hours Losers:

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: FBK -1.3%

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to news: MBX -11.7% (names new CEO and new CFO), RPT -6.9% (commences stock offering), PENG -6.7% (proposes $650 mln convertible notes offering), QTTB -4.8% (launches $200 mln public offering), CSGP -3.5% (CFO to step down, names new CFO), SSTK -2.1% (CEO steps down), ERAS -1.4% (updates Phase 1 ERAS-0015 data; outlines registration-enabling lung and pancreatic trials; also launches $500 mln common stock offering; also files mixed shelf offering), GROY -1.2% (acquires two net smelter return royalties), FLNC -1.1% (lands supply, EPC role for Avantus' 800 MWh Rexford 2 storage project), TRI -0.8% (cutting "a small number of roles" in engineering, according to Reuters), BF.B -0.6% (CEO to step down once successor named, according to WSJ), NNBR -0.6% (stock offering by selling shareholders), LYEL -0.6% (files for 1.1 mln share offering by selling shareholder), CBRL -0.4% (D. E. SHAW increased passive stake to 7.3% from 5.1%), CEVA -0.2% (COO to step down), INSE -0.1% (goes live in Alberta's newly regulated iGaming market), FSM -0.1% (files feasibility study for Diamba Sud Gold Project)