Lebanon Pager Blast Latest News: She speaks seven languages, has a PhD in particle physics, is also the CEO of a company, was in obscurity for three-four years, but has suddenly come into the limelight in the last two days. However, she is getting these headlines not because of her work, but because of her name, which is linked to the pager and walkie-talkie blast in Lebanon.
Cristiana Barsoni-Arcidiacono (49), the Italian-Hungarian CEO and owner of Hungary-based BAC Consulting, who lives in an apartment in Budapest, says she did not make the explosive pagers that killed 12 people and injured more than 2,000 in Lebanon this week. “We do not make that pager. We have a tie-up with Taiwanese pager maker Gold Apollo. We only make the design,” she says.
went underground after the explosion
She has not been seen in public since the media have been looking for her after her company’s name was revealed. Neighbours say they have not seen her. Barsoni-Arcidiacono has not responded to Reuters’ calls and emails and Reuters went to her private address in downtown Budapest without a response. Her flat in a stately old building in Budapest was open earlier this week but is now closed.
The Hungarian government said BAC is just a trading intermediary company
The Hungarian government said on Wednesday that BAC Consulting was a “business intermediary company” with no manufacturing site in the country and that Pejer had never visited Hungary. When Reuters spoke to her acquaintances and former colleagues, they described her as a woman of impressive intelligence.
Some regretted it, some praised it
Kilian Kleinschmidt, a former humanitarian administrator at the United Nations, hired Barsoni-Arcidiacono in 2019 to run a six-month Dutch-funded program to train Libyans in Tunisia in subjects such as hydroponics, IT and business development. He now considers hiring her a “big mistake.” A classmate of Barsoni-Arcidiacono said she lived in Santa Venerina, near Catania in eastern Sicily, as a child. Her father was a working mother and she attended a nearby high school. She earned a PhD in physics at University College London in the early 2000s but did not pursue a scientific career. She has not done any scientific work since.
Claims made about profile in CV not proven in reality
In a separate CV on the BAC Consulting website, she described herself as a “board member at the Earth Child Institute”, an educational and environmental charity in New York. The group’s founder, Donna Goodman, told Reuters that Barsoni-Arcidiacono never held any role there. “She was a friend of a friend of a board member, and she contacted us about a job opportunity in 2018, but was never invited to apply,” Goodman said.
That CV also described her as a former “project manager” at the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2008-2009, organising a nuclear research conference. The IAEA said its records showed she had been an intern there for eight months. On BAC Consulting’s website, which was taken down this weekend, the company gave little information about its actual business in Hungary. The company is registered to a serviced office address in Budapest.
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