German prosecutors said Thursday that they have launched an investigation into allegations that Deutsche Telekom AG monitored managers’ call records to track possible leaks of information to media.
Joerg Schindler, a spokesman for the prosecutors’ office in Bonn, where Telekom is based, confirmed that an investigation had been launched.
He later said that former CEO Kai-Uwe Ricke and former supervisory board chief Klaus Zumwinkel were under investigation, but did not give further details.
A company official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that offices at the firm’s Bonn headquarters were searched Thursday morning. Prosecutors refused to comment on that.
The telecommunications company has pledged a thorough investigation of the allegations, which were made public last weekend in the weekly Der Spiegel. On Saturday, it acknowledged that “there were cases of misuse of call records at Deutsche Telekom in 2005 and, according to latest allegations, also in 2006.”
Deutsche Telekom has stressed that there is no suggestion that calls were tapped, but rather that call records detailing the time, participants and duration of calls were improperly monitored.
Telekom has said that it investigated an individual case last summer, which led to a restructuring of its security department.
It says that, on April 28, the management board received “new, broader and more serious allegations” from “an external party who had apparently been involved in the incidents and who had been commissioned by a member of the group security department.” It called in prosecutors in mid-May.
The German Finance Ministry this week welcomed Deutsche Telekom’s commitment to investigate the allegations and reiterated its confidence in CEO Rene Obermann, who took over the top job in late 2006.
The government holds a 14.8 percent stake in Deutsche Telekom, a former state-owned monopoly, and an indirect stake of another 16.9 percent through the state-owned KfW bank.
Schindler said…