Vodafone this week paid the price for its buccaneering past, writing down assets to create the biggest loss in European corporate history. The largest mobile phone company in the world also caved in to shareholder demands to return more cash to them, and committed to what appears to be a ruinous dividend policy, that will relegate the stock to being a cash cow. Vodafone used the opportunity of its year end figures to totally re-align its balance sheet, taking savage impairments, the bulk of them a write down in value of its operations in Germany, acquired through a hostile $183 billion takeover of Mannesmann in 2000. Vodafone recorded smaller, but equally dramatic falls, in the value of its Italian assets…