Germany’s Deutsche Telekom has confirmed that it has indeed been spying on its employees more specifically board members with the help of an outside firm that they hired specifically to do the job.
It used private investigators to monitor conversations between board members and journalists in 2005/6.
The story was broken by German magazine Der Spiegel and spying was done at a time when the company was going through a major restructure involving over 30,000 job losses.
According to the report some people in management were concerned that directors were passing information to journalists due to which they decided to monitor conversations.
Thecase has caused a huge storm in Germany. Former German industry federation president Hans-Olaf Henkel called the case “just as reprehensible and disgusting” as the East German’s Stasi methods.
Deutsche Telekom insists that no phones were bugged, and that the investigative teams merely went through phone records to see who was calling whom.
Deutsche Telekom AG is a telecommunications company headquartered in Bonn, Germany. It is the largest telecommunications company in Germany and in the EU.
German government, which owns 32 per cent of Deutsche Telekom, has ordered an investigation.
Deutsche Telekom chief executive Rene Obermann said:
I am completely shocked by the allegations. We have involved the state prosecutors and will support them in their efforts to conduct a thorough investigation.
Kai Uwe Ricke the then CEO has denied any involvement in the use of private investigators.
No penalty of any kind seems to be on its way to being imposed upon DT and the consultancy firm it had as an accomplice.
It is interesting to note that a similar kind of case happened in 2006 when Newsweek published a story revealing that the chairwoman of HP, Patricia Dunn had hired a team of independent electronic-security experts who spied on HP board members and several journalists, to determine the source of leak of confidential details regarding HP’s long-term strategy.
The HP case led to a fine of $14.5m, and the firm was sued by the journalists and their family members who were spied on.
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