LONDON BRIEFING:THE SILENCE in the HomeServe call centres must be deafening. The arrival of winter heralds the peak selling season for the home repairs group, whose salesforce would normally be hard at work persuading worried householders to take out burst pipe and broken boiler insurance.

But the HomeServe salesforce has been silenced after it emerged the company may have been employing questionable tactics to shift its insurance policies, which also include electrical and household appliance repairs, broken windows, pest infestations and lost keys.

The company has taken the drastic step of suspending all outgoing sales calls from its call centres; these are unlikely to resume for up to six weeks as its telesales staff undergoes comprehensive retraining. Incoming calls will still be handled, although the phones are unlikely to be ringing off the hook with new customers.

More likely are calls from the company’s three million existing customers, worried about having been missold some of the 7.5 million policies already taken out.

HomeServe likes to call itself Britain’s “fifth emergency service” (the AA having nipped in some years ago to claim fourth position after fire, police and ambulance).

However the company now looks in dire need of some help itself, after its shares crashed by more than one-third on Monday as news of the sales suspension emerged, wiping almost £500 million from its stock market value.

The company’s colourful chief executive, Richard Harpin, who founded the business in 1993, moved to reassure the City that HomeServe remained on track to achieve market expectations for the financial year ending in March. Beyond that, however, it will clearly take a hit from the six-week sales suspension, as well as additional staff training costs.

There is also the risk that customers will be more worried about being ripped off than repairing their broken boilers and will cancel their policies.

HomeServe has not detailed exactly what its telesales staff got up to on the phones, other than to say there were cases where sales processes “did not meet the company’s required standards”.

It is not clear how many customers were involved but it appears some may have been have misled on policy details and on pricing, particularly of add-on policies. Sales staff are being given new scripts but if HomeServe is found to have been engaged in misselling, it may be forced to make refunds or pay compensation and could also face a fine from the Financial Services Authority.

Longer term, the reputational damage is difficult to calculate.

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Will Nick Buckles of G4S be able to “do a Tidjane” and keep his job following the hugely embarrassing – and costly – withdrawal of G4S’s £5.2 billion bid for ISS?

In the face of fierce opposition from leading shareholders, several of whom were, unusually, prepared to go public with their views, G4S had little choice but to abandon its audacious takeover of the Danish cleaning services and catering group.

Had the deal gone ahead, it would have created a global outsourcing giant with sales approaching £16 billion a year and a global workforce of 1.2 million people, making it one of the biggest employers in the world.

That was the theory anyway, but the market took fright at the sheer scale of the deal. As well as a £2 billion cash call on investors, G4S planned to take on debt of £3 billion to help pay for the move.

G4S shares shed more than one-fifth of their value the day the deal was unveiled just a few weeks ago. Despite a charm offensive to extol its merits, Buckles failed to win sufficient support among shareholders. He needed a 75 per cent majority and, rather than face the complete humiliation of seeing the transaction voted down at a general meeting today, Buckles and his chairman Alf Duch-Pedersen withdrew the offer yesterday.

Apart from their egos and the share price, which has yet to recover to its pre-ISS levels, the failed bid will cost G4S about £50 million in fees. Will it also cost Buckles his job, though? The G4S boss will no doubt be hoping investors are as understanding as they were with another FTSE 100 chief executive, the Prudential’s Tidjane Thiam, who also badly misjudged the mood of shareholders when the Pru made its abortive move on Asian rival AIG last year.

Thiam has kept his job despite fierce calls for his head and looks almost fully rehabilitated. The Pru boss will think twice before attempting another mega-takeover and Buckles, assuming G4S shareholders are forgiving, would be wise to heed the same advice.

Fiona Walsh writes for the Guardian in London