Out-Law News 2 min. read
29 May 2008, 1:14 pm
The former monopoly incumbent operator, which is still 31.7% owned by the German government, is accused of conducting a massive spying operation on managers, journalists and even board members to try to find the source of leaked news about the company.
News agency Reuters reports that prosecutors in Bonn announced an investigation into Deutsche Telekom over "data misuse" earlier today.
The scandal concerns company activities between 2005 and 2006, when the company was laying off workers. It is claimed that the company hired an outside agency to monitor contact between members of its supervisory board and journalists.
Some German press reports claim that the leak of the activity has come from the agency hired to carry out the work, in protest at the non-payment of its fee. Der Spiegel claimed that the spying operation was ordered by the former chairman of the supervisory board of the company and postal operator Deutsche Post, Klaus Zumwinkel.
Zumwinkel was recently discovered to have sent millions of euros to a Liechtenstein bank account in breach of tax laws.
Deutsche Post's supervisory board was split between representatives of the company and representatives of workers, and the assumption had been that leaks about job losses in the sensitive restructuring period had come from union representatives on the board.
The spying operation is likely to have been an attempt to establish if that was true. It is claimed that no calls were listened to, but that the investigation attempted to establish what phone numbers board members had called.
"The allegations made against the company do not relate to any unlawful use of the content of calls – in other words they do not concern the tapping of calls," said the company in a statement released on Saturday. "Call records are details of the time, duration and participants of calls."
Deutsche Telekom chief executive René Obermann was head of the company's mobile subsidiary T-Mobile at the time, and the company has said that he was not involved in any spying. He has appointed a law firm to investigate the claims.
"I am shaken to the core by these allegations. We take the situation most seriously," he said. "We have called in the public prosecutor's office and will support them in their full investigation of these allegations."
News agency Associated Press quoted a finance ministry spokesman as saying: "we welcome all measures taken by the board and by prosecutors... there is no reason at all to call into question our confidence in Mr. Obermann".
The case mirrors that of Hewlett Packard in the US, which in 2006 was found to have spied on its board members and reporters in an apparent attempt to find out who was leaking information to the media.
There HP chairwoman Patricia Dunn resigned over the scandal, which involved an agency being hired to obtain board members' phone records for analysis.
In Germany, prosecutors are reported to be examining whether or not to open a case of violation of data protection laws as a result of the allegations made about Deutsche Telekom.
