The investment bank Goldman Sachs sold 91 million Deutsche Telekom shares for 1.54 billion euros on Wednesday night.
This transaction was part of a complex derivative transaction with the Japanese technology investor Softbank, which bought into Telekom at the beginning of September and thus became the second largest shareholder after the German state.
Softbank had, however, been given the opportunity to use the shares as collateral for its own financing transactions or for hedging transactions.
At that time, the Japanese had taken over 225 million new Telekom shares at a unit price of 20 euros, which they must hold until the end of 2024.
Softbank is now using part of it as security for its business with Goldman Sachs. This will not change anything in Softbank's stake of 4.5 percent, said a Telekom spokesman.
Goldman Sachs brought the shares (1.8 percent of Telekom's share capital) to institutional investors at a price of 16.95 euros.
That is a discount of 3.7 percent on the Xetra closing price of the T-share on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, this is just under 2 percent in the red.
Telekom boss Tim Höttges classifies the relationship with Softbank as a strategic partnership.
The Japanese helped Telekom to increase its stake in the subsidiary T-Mobile US to 48.4 from 43.2 percent;
in the long term it should become a majority.
T-Mobile US merged with competitor Sprint, which Softbank owned, last year.
In return for the purchase of shares by Softbank, Telekom received 45 million shares from T-Mobile US at the time.