Labor's attack was stepped up in the Senate after Prime Minister John Howard's August 25 announcement that an $8 billion T3 sale would go ahead. The announcement followed two crucial decisions by Telstra, to hold its dividend at 28c a share this year, and to quarantine the T3 sale process from comments by Phil Burgess, the senior Telstra executive who is leading the telco's campaign against what it says is value-destroying regulation. In a letter sent to Australian Securities and Investment Commission chairman Jeff Lucy on the day the T3 sale was announced, Senator Conroy and the shadow finance minister Lindsay Tanner said ASIC should investigate whether Telstra's board was being pressured to act contrary to the interests of the company and its shareholders; ■ and that the Government and unnamed advisers created an uninformed market in Telstra shares after T3 was announced, by raising the possibility of an entitlements offer for existing Telstra shareholders without detailing it.