FORMER foreign secretary Lord Hurd and a group of blue-chip establishment figures are this weekend coming under increased pressure to rein in the activities of a company that has been branded “the corporate equivalent of a rogue state’’.

Hurd is a member of the six-man “advisory board” of the telecoms giant Altimo, a subsidiary of the Russian conglomerate Alfa Group.

Altimo has been involved in a rancorous row with the Norwegian telecoms group Telenor over their jointly owned Ukrain-ian mobile-phone company, Kyvistar.

Telenor has accused Altimo of using underhand tactics to try to gain control of Kyvistar and took the Russian company to the International Panel of Arbitration in New York. The panel was asked to rule on whether Altimo had broken a shareholders’ agreement spelling out the basis of the relationship between the Russian group and its Norwegian counterpart.

The panel this month ruled in favour of Telenor. It said Altimo had broken the shareholders’ agreement with Telenor; that it had breached a noncompetition pact with the Norwegians; and had wrongly tried to wriggle out of an agreement under which disputes would be resolved by arbitration in New York.

But Altimo has responded by saying that “according to Ukrain-ian law, it is impossible to recognise and enforce the arbitration award in Ukraine’’. The Russian company is refusing to comply with the New York panel ruling.

Now Telenor is appealing to Hurd and the other members of the heavyweight advisory board. They are: Sir Roderick Lyne, who was British ambassador to Russia; Kurt Hellstrom, president and chief executive of Ericsson until 2003; Sir Julian Horn-Smith, who spent more than two decades with Vodafone, becoming the company’s deputy chief executive until his departure last summer; Jack Rosen, chairman of the Council for World Jewry and a former confidant of Bill Clinton; and Peter Watson, who sat on the US National Security Council during the first Bush administration.

A letter sent last week by Jan Edvard Thygesen, executive vice-president of Telenor, said: “By violating the clear terms of the shareholders’ agreements that it actively negotiated and executed . . . Altimo has become the corporate equivalent of a rogue state.”

The letter calls on the members of the advisory board to “address these issues and take actions to encourage Altimo to . . . promptly and fully comply with the arbitration awards by which they are bound”.

Hurd and his colleagues have not spoken publicly about Altimo’s behaviour. The Sunday Times disclosed last month that Altimo had been trying to negotiate a deal to buy a half share in the Iranian mobile-phone company Iraphone.

Telenor is trying to put pressure on the Altimo advisers to show that they really are monitoring the company’s activities.

A Telenor spokesman told The Sunday Times: “What, if any, moral responsibility does the advisory board have for the actions of Altimo?’’ He said: “Their outrageous behaviour not just in the Ukraine but in Iran, Indonesia and other places must surely concern the members of the advisory board. Bluntly, what are they paid to do?’’ The members of Altimo’s advisory board have no fiduciary responsibility. But they do lend gravitas to Altimo, the telecoms offshoot of Alfa Group, headed by 43-year-old Russian oligarch Mikhail Friedman.

This is not the first time that Hurd has become embroiled in controversy since quitting as foreign secretary. As deputy chairman of NatWest Markets – now part of Royal Bank of Scotland– he was a key figure in the privati-sation of Telekom Serbia. Just 12 months after leaving office, Hurd had a breakfast meeting with the then Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, thought to have been a turning point in getting the pri-vatisation process under way.

Attempts to contact Hurd were unsuccessful.

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