New Delhi: 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. But, Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono, 49, the Italian-Hungarian CEO and owner of Hungary-based BAC Consulting, says she hasn’t made 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. “I am just the intermediate. I think you got it wrong,” she said, according to a Reuters report.
Since then, she has not appeared in public. Neighbours say they haven’t seen her. She did not respond to messages seeking comment. Her flat in a stately old Budapest building, where a door to a vestibule had been open earlier in the week, has been shuttered. Discussions with acquaintances and former work colleagues paint a picture of a woman with an impressive intellect, but a peripatetic career in a string of short-term jobs in which she never quite settled down, despite embellishing her CV along the way.
An acquaintance of hers, who like others who knew her socially in Budapest asked not to be identified, said she seemed like someone who “could easily be used”. “Good-willed, not a business type, more like someone who often tries something new, who quickly believes things and then gets enthusiastic about that,” the person said, adding that Barsony-Arcidiacono had been looking for income as she wanted to leave another job.
Kilian Kleinschmidt, a veteran ex-U.N. 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 her as a “bullying” manager, and said he released her before her contract was over.
“Cristiana. That was one of the biggest mistakes of my life, I think,” Kleinschmidt told Reuters. “It was simply awful on a personal level… Then at some point I said enough is enough. I should probably have done it sooner. I said that’s enough and I sent her home a month early.”
Barsony-Arcidiacono has not responded to Reuters calls and emails and there was no answer when Reuters visited her private address in downtown Budapest, the report added.
