Event Verizon: Akon blows his contract

US telecoms giant Verizon has hung up on its deal with Akon, and deleted him from their phonebook. It was all going so well, until Akon went to Trinidad and simulated sex with an underage girl on stage.

There also seems to be some suggestion he might have promised the girl a trip to Africa as some sort of prize in a non-existent competition, which makes him not only seedy, but grubby in a whole lot of other ways.

Akon has suggested the whole thing was the spirit moving him, or something:

"I got carried away," Alleyne, a pastor's daughter, said in a public apology last month after a local TV station aired the footage. "I started to dance, as well, but I never thought it was going to be like that. I was shocked. My head was hitting the floor."

Luckily, though - or perhaps, unluckily - he managed to pick up his head long enough to get to the end of the routine where he pretended he was fucking a teenager on stage.

There is, of course, an innocent victim in this - Gwen Stefani, oddly enough. Akon was opening for her on her US tour, and so keen are Verizon to distance themselves from even the merest hint of underwriting the activities of a kiddie-fiddler, they've yanked their funding for that, too:

"This week the partnership ended," Verizon said in a statement to Fox News. "We have music services on our cell phone service and we were promoting him as one of the artists. The other part of the sponsorship was the Gwen Stefani tour, of which he was an opening act. We are no longer sponsoring the tour."

It's not yet clear if the loss of this sponsorship will force Gwen to cut back on the number of muter Japanese children who will follow her around backstage.