Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono, 49, an Italian-Hungarian executive and owner of Hungary-based BAC Consulting, said she did not create the explosive pager that killed 12 people and injured more than 2,000 in Lebanon this week.
After it was discovered that her company had licensed the pager design from Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo, Barsony-Arcidiacono said she was not the one who manufactured them. “I was just a middleman,” she said.
Since then, she has not appeared in public.
The Hungarian government said BAC Consulting was a "commercial intermediary company" with no manufacturing facilities in the country and the pagers were never shipped to Hungary.
A selfie of Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono, Italian-Hungarian CEO and owner of BAC Consulting. Photo: Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono/Facebook
Through conversations with Barsony-Arcidiacono's acquaintances and former colleagues, it is clear that she was a woman of impressive intellect whose career "traveled" through a series of short-term jobs in which she never really settled.
An acquaintance of Barsony-Arcidiacono calls her “a nice person, not a business person.” The person said she seemed enthusiastic about trying something new and easily convinced of anything.
In 2019, Kilian Kleinschmidt, a former UN humanitarian administrator, hired Barsony-Arcidiacono to run a six-month Dutch-funded program to train Libyans in Tunisia in subjects such as hydroponics, IT and business development.
Kleinschmidt described hiring Ms Barsony-Arcidiacono as a “big mistake”. After disagreements over how she managed staff, he said he let her go before her contract ended.
She lived in an apartment in a stately old building in Budapest, where the iron gate surrounding the small entrance hall remained closed. The walls were covered with red and orange chalk sketches of nude models. No one answered the bell.
A woman who has lived in the building for the past two years said Barsony-Arcidiacono had been a resident before she moved in. The woman described Barsony-Arcidiacono as nice, quiet but sociable.
The person said she practiced painting as part of a Budapest art club, although she had not participated for several years. The person also said she seemed more like a businesswoman than an artist but was cheerful and outgoing.
A school friend of Barsony-Arcidiacono said she grew up in a family with a working father and a housewife mother in Santa Venerina, near Catania in eastern Sicily, and attended high school nearby. He described her as quite reserved.
In the early 2000s, she earned a PhD in Physics from University College London (UCL), where her thesis was on the positron—a subatomic particle with the mass of an electron and a positive charge. But it appears she left without pursuing a career in science.
“As far as I know, she hasn’t done any scientific work since,” said Akos Torok, a retired physicist who was one of her professors at UCL.
The resume she used to apply for the Kleinschmidt job mentioned other postgraduate degrees in politics and development from the London School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies. She then went on to describe a series of jobs working on non-governmental projects in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
In a separate CV on the BAC Consulting website, she describes herself as a “board member at the Earth Child Institute,” a New York-based environmental and education charity. However, the group’s founder, Donna Goodman, said Ms. Barsony-Arcidiacono has never held any role there.
“She was a friend of a friend of a board member and contacted us about a vacancy in 2018, but she was never invited to apply,” Goodman said.
That CV also describes her as a former “Project Manager” at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2008-2009, who organized a nuclear research conference. The IAEA said its records show she interned there for eight months.
“I am a scientist who uses my very diverse background to work on interdisciplinary projects to inform strategic decisions (water and climate policy, investments),” Barsony-Arcidiacono wrote on her CV.
Ngoc Anh (according to Reuters)
Source: https://www.congluan.vn/chan-dung-nguoi-phu-nu-bi-an-co-cong-ty-lien-quan-den-may-nhan-tin-phat-no-post313313.html
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