http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/19/business/worldbusiness/19VODA.html
"Vodafone Chief Announces Retirement
Sir Christopher Gent, the deal-making chief executive who turned the Vodafone Group of Britain into the largest wireless telephone company in the world, said yesterday that he would retire next summer.
Sir Christopher, one of the few top European telecommunications executives to survive the industry’s collapse after its recent boom, will be replaced by Arun Sarin, 48, an Indian-born American citizen who ran Vodafone’s United States and Asia Pacific operations until a couple of years ago.
Mr. Sarin is a nonexecutive director of the company. Most recently, he has run Accel-KKR Telecom, a communications business based in San Francisco and owned by the venture capital firm Accel Partners and the buyout shop Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company. He sits on the boards of Charles Schwab, Cisco Systems and Gap, but Vodafone said he would step down from most of them.
With an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, India, and one in business from the University of California at Berkeley, Mr. Sarin became a telecommunications executive at Pacific Telesis, and he went with AirTouch when Pacific Telesis spun it off in 1994."