HURRICANE Dean slammed into the Caribbean coast of Mexico yesterday as a roaring Category 5 hurricane, the most intense Atlantic storm to make landfall in two decades.

The storm - the third most intense Atlantic hurricane to make landfall since record-keeping began in the 1850s - lashed Mayan ruins and was heading for the oil installations of the Yucatan peninsula.

It had killed 13 people on its way across the Caribbean, but it hit a sparsely populated stretch of the Mexican coast and skirted the resorts where 50,000 holidaymakers had been evacuated.

It weakened within hours to a Category 2 storm, with winds that had gusted up to 200mph dropping to 105mph.

Dean struck land near the cruise port of Majahual and then raced towards the Bay of Campeche, where the state oil company evacuated the offshore rigs that produce most of Mexico’s oil and gas.

The storm dumped huge amounts of rain on the low-lying peninsula, where thousands of Mayan Indians live in wooden huts in isolated communities. With the storm still raging, there were no reports of deaths, injuries or serious damage.

Felix Gonzalez, governor of Quintana Roo, said 250 small communities had been evacuated, but local media reported that others, carrying machetes, turned away soldiers and refused to leave. Driving rain, poor communications and impassable roads made it impossible to determine how they fared.

The eye of the storm passed over the state capital, Chetumal, where residents were ordered to stay inside after a harrowing night with windows shattering and water tanks flying off rooftops. Sirens wailed as the storm battered the city, hurling down billboards. All electricity was cut off.

Across the border in Belize, trees fell and debris flew through the air. The government evacuated Caye Caulker and Ambergris Caye - both popular with tourists - and ordered a dusk-to-dawn curfew from Belize City north to the Mexican border.

In the largely Mayan town of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, about 30 miles north of the eye’s westward path, people stared from their porches at tree branches and electrical cables crisscrossing streets flooded ankle-deep.

“We began to feel the strong winds at about two in the morning, and you could hear trees were breaking and some tin roofs were coming off,” said shop worker Miguel Colli, 36. “Everyone holed up in their houses. Thank God the worst is over.”

BRUSSELS, Belgium: An EU cap on roaming charges has reduced mobile phone bills by up to 60 percent since being introduced this summer, slashing costs for millions of EU citizens, the European Commission said.

The EU has set a price ceiling of \0.49, or $0.69 per minute for making a mobile phone call when abroad and \0.24 for receiving one, plus value-added tax, arguing operators were reaping massive profits from unjustifiably high roaming charges.

The so-called Eurotariff, in place since July 30, reduced phone bills for millions of Europeans, from traveling executives to holiday-makers.

“By Aug. 30, around 200 million EU consumers had already switched to the Eurotariff,” the commission said in a statement. It estimated more than 400 million EU citizens enjoyed the new rates by the end of September.

Mobile operators have lamented the move, saying it is hitting their margins hard and could push up the prices of other telecom services.

National regulators were studying whether reduced roaming charges were being offset by increased rates for other services and would publish a report in December, EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding said.

The cheapest roaming rates Д around \0.20 per minute of both incoming and outgoing calls Д were being offered in the Netherlands, Reding said. Operators in Britain, Ireland, Austria and Belgium were also offering deals way below the maximum rates.

But Reding said some operators seem not to have adhered to strict transparency standards, which required operators to inform customers of their right to be switched to the Eurotariff as of Aug. 30.

She cited Belgian company Mobistar as a possible violator of the guidelines and said she had written a letter to Belgian regulators to look into the complaints she has received.

Reding said she would push for similar price caps on cross-border text messaging and data transmission if operators themselves do not reduce their charges.

“If they do not respond to that appeal, were planning to take action by late 2008,” Reding said, adding that the commission was analyzing prices of SMS and data services.

Operators “know we feel the rates they charge are excessively high, and theyre perfectly aware that sooner or later the European Parliament is going to ask the Commission to step in,” she said.

The ceilings on roaming charges will drop further, to \0.43 for making calls abroad and \0.19 for receiving them, by 2009. The regulation will then lapse, unless the EU decides to extend it.

Reding said customers paid on average \1.10 per minute to make a phone call from abroad in 2006 and \0.58 per minute to receive one.

Belgian national operator Belgacom SA warned that the new roaming rules will shave \23 million, or 1 percent, from its 2007 revenues, and \14 million from its total earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization.

Vodafone Group PLC, the worlds largest mobile phone operator by sales, said in May that the roaming regime would cost the group between 200 million and 250 million pounds this year.

ARISTOCRAT Leisure has conceded in the Federal Court that it overstated profits from its disastrous foray into the South American poker machine business in 2001 and the first half of 2002, and should have corrected bullish statements about its full-year result for 2002.

The shock announcement in February 2003 of a profit drop in the face of predictions of a 27 per cent increase claimed the jobs of chief executive Des Randall and others, wiped $1.5 billion from Aristocrat’s sharemarket value in 2003 and spawned a shareholder class action that opened yesterday.

The shareholders’ law firm, Maurice Blackburn Cashman, estimates the case could cost the company $190 million on one assessment of damages and $396 million on a second.

Aristocrat has yet to file a statement of defence reflecting its late admissions, but it will argue these sums vastly overstate any losses that can be legally linked to its misadventures when it tried to sell mostly second-hand Australian gaming machines to casinos in Brazil, Peru and Colombia.

The shareholders’ barrister, Stephen Gageler, SC, said he would call an expert witness who would show that an investor holding shares at the time would have lost a cumulative $2.47 a share from the misconduct.

Mr Gageler said he interpreted an expert report for Aristocrat as producing a comparable figure of 45.

Even if Justice Margaret Stone agreed completely with the second analysis, “we would still claim a substantial judgement”, Mr Gageler said.

The case is about four deals to sell what Mr Gageler called “old pokies from clubs in Australia” to South American companies with “credit risks”.

“To the knowledge of (senior management) but apparently unknown to Aristocrat’s increasingly suspicious and nervous auditors, PricewaterhouseCoopers, each transaction was an unmitigated commercial disaster from the beginning,” he said. Apart from question marks over whether the South American companies would pay their bills, there were problems with customs clearances and regulatory approvals, and Aristocrat “was simply unable to deliver poker machines that were in working order”.

Mr Gageler attributed this to the Sydney company’s “great haste in trying to get the transactions done before the end of each reporting period”.

In pre-trial talks, Aristocrat admitted it had wrongly booked $15 million in pre-tax profit for the year to December 2001 and $12 million for the six months to June 2002. The company has also conceded that from December 10, 2002, it had no reasonable grounds for sticking with a forecast that it would earn $109 million after tax that year.