On the trail of the mystery woman whose company licensed exploding pagers
What Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono, 49, the Italian-Hungarian CEO and owner of Hungary-based BAC Consulting, says she hasn't done is make the exploding pagers that killed 12 people and wounded more than 2,000 in Lebanon this week
She speaks seven languages, has a PhD in particle physics, an apartment in Budapest plastered with her own pastel drawings of nudes, and a career that took her around Africa and Europe doing humanitarian work.
What Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono, 49, the Italian-Hungarian CEO and owner of Hungary-based BAC Consulting, says she hasn't done is make the exploding pagers that killed 12 people and wounded more than 2,000 in Lebanon this week.
After her company was revealed to have licensed the design for the pagers from their original Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo, Barsony-Arcidiacono told NBC News that she didn't make them.
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"I am just the intermediate. I think you got it wrong," she said.
Since then, she has not appeared in public. Neighbours say they haven't seen her. Barsony-Arcidiacono has not responded to Reuters calls and emails and there was no answer when Reuters visited her private address in downtown Budapest. Her flat in a stately old Budapest building, where a door to a vestibule had been open earlier in the week, has been shuttered.
Following publication of this story, Reuters again reached out to her but received no reply. The Hungarian government said on Wednesday that BAC Consulting was a "trading-intermediary company" which had no manufacturing site in the country and that the pagers had never been to Hungary.
Discussions with acquaintances and former work colleagues paint a picture of a woman with an impressive intellect with a peripatetic career in a string of short-term jobs in which she never quite settled down.
An acquaintance of hers, who like others who knew her socially in Budapest asked not to be identified, called her "Good-willed, not a business type". The person said she appeared to be someone who is always enthusiastic to try something new and readily believed things.
Kilian Kleinschmidt, a veteran ex-UN humanitarian administrator who hired Barsony-Arcidiacono in 2019 to run a six-month Dutch-funded programme to train Libyans in Tunisia in subjects such as hydroponics, IT and business development, described hiring her as a big "mistake". After disagreements in how she managed staff, he said he let her go before her contract was over, which Reuters could not independently verify.
At her Budapest home, a steel outer gate encloses a small vestibule where life drawings of nudes sketched in red and orange pastels can be seen taped up on the wall. An inner door leading into her apartment was ajar when Reuters first visited the building on Wednesday, and closed when the reporter returned on Thursday. No one answered the bell.
