Profits have topped £10 billion and a strategy of investing big money in fast-growing markets is paying off.

Instead, Financial Mail can reveal that Sarin presided over one of the most squalid episodes in UK corporate history.

Tensions: Behind the smiles, Lord Maclaurin, left and Arun Sarin, were engaged in a bitter boardroom struggle at Vodafone

The company grabbed mobile phone call data and used it to try to prove a conspiracy against Sarin in 2006 and discover whether company figures were briefing the Press and analysts.

Vodafone was compiling reports on its own chairman, its founding chief executive and other nonexecutive directors in moves that not only flout the company's own code of ethics and breach every accepted norm of boardroom independence, but may also have come close to illegal snooping.

The episode came during some of the mobile phone giant's darkest hours when there was a serious chance that Sarin would be ousted. And the company targeted some of the most esteemed business people of their generation.

Included were Lord MacLaurin of Knebworth, the man behind Tesco's transformation from an also-ran supermarket to retail giant, who was chairman of Vodafone.

Targeted: Former Coca-Cola UUK president Penny Hughes was among the Vodafone directors whose call data was analysed