Not the one you were after, but another I came across in Sun Age...

Not the one you were after, but another I came across in Sun Age today.....you may be interested.

"It's time for small shareholders to take a deep breath and sit pat, writes David Koch.

Not much fun being one of the 1.4 million Telstra shareholders at the moment, is it?

While Telstra executives and federal politicians continue with their very public spat, $10 billion has been wiped from the value of your stock since July.

You feel like knocking their heads together to get some sense into them. Enough is enough.

We have every right to be the ones getting angry. As they push their own personal agendas we're the ones copping the financial hit.

Even if you don't own Telstra shares direct, you certainly have an interest in its future as inevitably it will be part of your superannuation fund's portfolio and therefore your retirement nest egg.

If you're a direct Telstra shareholder don't panic and sell without thinking things through and getting advice from your broker or financial planner. Things may sound a bit grim, but take a deep breath.

Even though the Telstra share price has dropped and a lot of negative information is coming out, remember you have a very attractive fully franked dividend about to be paid that you don't want to miss out on.

Analysts reports are that the current Telstra share price of around $4.50 a share is about right, given the circumstances, so indications are it's unlikely to fall sharply from these levels, given the current information available.

But it would certainly help the share price if the major players in this spat got their act together. Both sides are to blame.

It does seem amazing that Telstra's new American chief executive Sol Trujillo and the three compatriots he brought with him could be so aggressive in trying to literally bounce the Prime Minister. They've been here two minutes, they're demanding a change in regulations and they're playing hardball.

For one of those executives to publicly claim he wouldn't put his mother into Telstra shares shows an appalling lack of leadership.

It's all about providing competitors with access to Telstra's copper wire network, the fixed phone lines. Trujillo doesn't like the deal agreed to before he arrived, and approved by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which established the pricing for which competitors can use Telstra's phone lines.

He wants a better deal for Telstra. One that would continue to see it having a controlling influence in the market.

What Trujillo and his "Three Amigos" have to understand is that while Telstra owns the phone lines, the Australian taxpayer actually paid for them before Telstra was privatised. Those same taxpayers have now decided they want competition in the telecommunications market to bring efficiencies and reduced costs.

For that to be achieved, new entrants have every right to be able to access the existing infrastructure at a competitive price. The current deal provides that and the regulator agrees.

So, Sol Trujillo, get over it. Them's the rules. Like everyone else, you have to live with them so get on with the job of making fundamental operational change within Telstra to make it a better company to compete in an open market. Its days as a monopoly are over and they won't be coming back.

But while it's easy to have a go at Trujillo, the Telstra board needs looking at as well. It would be very unusual for a chief executive to be this aggressive without the support of the board. It makes you wonder whether the board has deliberately engineered the confrontation and is supporting the stance by its executives. If so, they need to accept the same sort of criticism.

Then there's the infamous report that Trujillo showed the Prime Minister that outlined the hidden warts of Telstra. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has every right to take action against not only Telstra executives for giving it to a shareholder, but also the Prime Minister for not disclosing it to the market.

It contained market-sensitive information that every shareholder has the right to be aware of. Full disclosure is a fundamental to the operation of our markets and cannot be compromised.

It is an outrageous breach of trust, and the corporations law, by both Telstra executives and the Prime Minister.

No amount of spin can change that".