On the trail of the mysterious woman whose company had a license to make explosive pagers

She speaks seven languages, has a PhD in particle physics, a Budapest apartment filled with her pastel nude drawings, and a career that has taken her to Africa and Europe on humanitarian work.

What Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono, 49, the Italian-Hungarian CEO and owner of Hungary-based BAC Consulting, says she didn’t do was build the explosive pagers that killed 12 people and injured more than 2,000 in Lebanon this week.

After it was revealed that his company had licensed the pager design from the original Taiwanese manufacturer, Gold Apollo, Barsony-Arcidiacono told NBC News that he no longer produces them.

“I’m just the middleman. I think you guys got it wrong,” he said.

She has not appeared in public since. Neighbors say they have not seen her. Barsony-Arcidiacono did not respond to calls and emails from Reuters and did not receive a response when Reuters visited her private address in central Budapest.

On Saturday, the Hungarian government said its intelligence services conducted several interviews with Barsony-Arcidiacono after the explosions.

The Hungarian government said on Wednesday that BAC Consulting is an “intermediary trading company” that does not have a factory in the country and that the pagers have never been in Hungary.

Conversations with acquaintances and former colleagues paint a picture of a woman with an impressive intellect and a career in a series of short-term jobs where she never settled.

An acquaintance of hers, who, like others who knew her socially in Budapest, asked not to be named, described her as “good-natured but not the business type.” The person said she seemed to be someone who was always enthusiastic about trying something new and who readily believed in things.

Kilian Kleinschmidt, a veteran former U.N. humanitarian administrator who hired Barsony-Arcidiacono in 2019 to run a six-month, Dutch-funded program to train Libyans in Tunisia in subjects including hydroponics, computer science and business development, described her hiring as a grave “mistake.” After disagreements over how she ran the team, he said he let her go before her contract expired, something Reuters could not independently verify.

In his Budapest home, a steel exterior gate closes off a small foyer where drawings of nudes in red and orange crayons can be seen plastered on the wall. An interior door leading to his apartment was ajar when Reuters first visited the building on Wednesday and was locked when the reporter returned on Thursday. No one answered the doorbell.

A woman who has lived in the building for two years said Barsony-Arcidiacono was already a resident when she moved in and described her as kind, not loud but communicative.

She practiced drawing at an art club in Budapest, although she hadn’t been there for several years, said the group’s organizer, who said she looked more like a businesswoman than an artist, but was lively and outgoing.

A schoolmate of Barsony-Arcidiacono said she grew up in a family with a working father and a stay-at-home mother in Santa Venerina, near Catania in eastern Sicily, and attended high school nearby. She described her as a rather reserved young woman.

In the early 2000s, she earned a PhD in physics from University College London, where her thesis on positrons – a subatomic particle with the mass of an electron and a positive charge – remains available on the UCL website. But she appears to have left without pursuing a scientific career.

“As far as I know, she has not done any scientific work since then,” Akos Torok, a retired physicist who was one of her professors at UCL and who published papers with her at the time, told Reuters in an email.

A CV he used to get Kleinschmidt’s job included references to other postgraduate degrees, in politics and development, from the London School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies, which Reuters was unable to verify.

He then described a series of works on NGO projects in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

In a separate resume on BAC Consulting’s website, she described herself as a “board member of the Earth Child Institute,” a New York-based environmental and educational charity. The group’s founder, Donna Goodman, told Reuters that Barsony-Arcidiacono never held any position at the institute.

“She was friends with a friend of a board member and reached out to us about a job opening” in 2018, Goodman said. “But she was never asked to apply.”

That resume also described her as a former “project manager” at the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2008-2009 who organized a conference on nuclear research. The IAEA said her records show she was interned there for eight months.

On BAC Consulting’s website, which went offline at the end of this week, the company provided little information about its actual operations in Hungary. Its registered office is a serviced office in a suburb of Budapest.

“I am a scientist who uses my very diverse background to work on interdisciplinary projects to make strategic decisions (water and climate policy, investments),” Barsony-Arcidiacono wrote on her resume.

“With excellent analytical, linguistic and interpersonal skills, I enjoy working and leading in a multicultural environment where diversity, integrity and humor are valued.”

Source: Terra

Rose

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