By Krisztina Than
BUDAPEST (Reuters) -She speaks seven languages, has a PhD in particle physics, an condominium in Budapest plastered along with her personal pastel drawings of nudes, and a profession that took her round Africa and Europe doing humanitarian work.
What Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono, 49, the Italian-Hungarian CEO and proprietor of Hungary-based BAC Consulting, says she hasn’t accomplished is make the exploding pagers that killed 12 folks and wounded greater than 2,000 in Lebanon this week.
After her firm was revealed to have licensed the design for the pagers from their authentic Taiwanese producer Gold Apollo, Barsony-Arcidiacono informed NBC Information that she did not make them.
“I’m simply the intermediate. I feel you bought it fallacious,” she stated.
Since then, she has not appeared in public. Neighbours say they have not seen her. Barsony-Arcidiacono has not responded to Reuters calls and emails and there was no reply when Reuters visited her non-public tackle in downtown Budapest. Her flat in a stately previous Budapest constructing, the place a door to a vestibule had been open earlier within the week, has been shuttered.
Following publication of this story, Reuters once more reached out to her however acquired no reply. The Hungarian authorities stated on Wednesday that BAC Consulting was a “trading-intermediary firm” which had no manufacturing web site within the nation and that the pagers had by no means been to Hungary.
Discussions with acquaintances and former work colleagues paint an image of a girl with a powerful mind with a peripatetic profession in a string of short-term jobs during which she by no means fairly settled down.
An acquaintance of hers, who like others who knew her socially in Budapest requested to not be recognized, known as her “Good-willed, not a enterprise kind”. The individual stated she gave the impression to be somebody who’s all the time enthusiastic to attempt one thing new and readily believed issues.
Kilian Kleinschmidt, a veteran ex-U.N. humanitarian administrator who employed Barsony-Arcidiacono in 2019 to run a six-month Dutch-funded programme to coach Libyans in Tunisia in topics corresponding to hydroponics, IT and enterprise improvement, described hiring her as a giant “mistake”. After disagreements in how she managed workers, he stated he let her go earlier than her contract was over, which Reuters couldn’t independently confirm.
At her Budapest house, a metal outer gate encloses a small vestibule the place life drawings of nudes sketched in pink and orange pastels could be seen taped up on the wall. An internal door main into her condominium was ajar when Reuters first visited the constructing on Wednesday, and closed when the reporter returned on Thursday. Nobody answered the bell.
A girl residing within the constructing for the previous two years stated Barsony-Arcidiacono was already a resident when she moved in, and described her as sort, not loud, however communicative.
She practiced her drawing as a part of a Budapest artwork membership, although she hadn’t attended for a few years, stated the organiser of the group, who stated she appeared like extra of a businesswoman than an artist however was upbeat and outgoing.
A faculty mate of Barsony-Arcidiacono stated she grew up in a household with a working father and housewife mom in Santa Venerina, close to Catania in japanese Sicily, and attended highschool close by. He described her as a fairly reserved teenager.
Within the early 2000s she earned her PhD in physics at College Faculty London, the place her dissertation on positrons – a subatomic particle with the mass of an electron and a optimistic cost – stays obtainable on the UCL web site. However she seems to have left with out pursuing a scientific profession.
“So far as I do know she has not accomplished scientific work since then,” Akos Torok, a retired physicist who was one in every of her professors at UCL and printed papers along with her on the time, informed Reuters by e-mail.
A resume she used to get the job working for Kleinschmidt included references to different post-graduate levels, in politics and improvement, from the London Faculty of Economics and the Faculty of Oriental and African Research, which Reuters was not capable of confirm.
She then went on to explain a string of jobs engaged on NGO tasks in Europe, Africa and the Center East.
In a separate CV on the BAC Consulting web site, she described herself as a “Board Member on the Earth Baby Institute”, an academic and environmental charity in New York. The group’s founder, Donna Goodman, informed Reuters Barsony-Arcidiacono had by no means held any position there.
“She was a buddy of a buddy of a board member, and contacted us a few job opening” in 2018, Goodman stated. “However she was by no means invited to use.”
That CV additionally described her as a former “Venture Supervisor” on the Worldwide Atomic Vitality Company in 2008-2009, who organised a nuclear analysis convention. The IAEA stated its information indicated she had been an intern there for eight months.
On BAC Consulting’s web site, which was taken down by the tip of this week, the corporate gave little concept of its precise enterprise in Hungary. Its registered tackle is a serviced workplace in a Budapest suburb.
“I’m a scientist utilizing my very various background to work on interdisciplinary tasks for strategic decision-making(water & local weather coverage, investments),” Barsony-Arcidiacono wrote on her CV.
“With wonderful analytical, language, and interpersonal expertise, I take pleasure in working and main in a multicultural atmosphere the place range, integrity, and humour are valued.”
