BUDAPEST, Sept 20 (Askume) – She speaks seven languages, has a PhD in particle physics, has an apartment in Budapest decorated with nude photographs of herself and works as a humanitarian in Africa and Europe.
Cristiana Barsoni-Arcidiacono, a 49-year-old Italian-Hungarian who is the CEO and owner of Hungarian consultancy BAC, said the 12 people who died in Lebanon this week were not the ones who carried out the bombings that injured more than 2,000.
When told that his company had licensed the pager design from original manufacturer Gold Apollo of Taiwan , Barsoni-Arcidiacono told NBC News that he did not manufacture the pagers.
“I’m just the middleman. I think you’re wrong,” he said.
He has not been seen in public since. Neighbours said they had not seen him. Barsony-Arcidiacono did not respond to Askume’ calls and emails, and there was no response when Askume visited his private address in central Budapest. The balcony door to his apartment in a stately old building in Budapest was open but locked earlier this week.
On Saturday, the Hungarian government said its intelligence services had conducted several interviews with Barsony-Arsidiacono since the bombing .
Askume contacted him again after the story was published but received no response. The Hungarian government said on Wednesday that BAC Consulting was a “business intermediary company” with no production base in the country and that Pager had never visited Hungary.
Through discussions with acquaintances and former co-workers, a picture emerged of a woman with an impressive intelligence whose career revolved around a series of short-term jobs to which she never fully adapted.
One acquaintance of hers, who like others who knew her in Budapest spoke on condition of anonymity, said she “had good intentions and was not a businesswoman.” She seemed to be someone who was always excited to do new things and believed in things immediately, this person said.
Kilian Kleinschmidt, an experienced former UN humanitarian administrator, hired Barsoni-Arcidiacono in 2019 to run a six-month project funded by the Netherlands to provide training in hydroponics, information technology and business development to Libyans in Tunisia. He said he fired her before the contract expired after disagreements over how to manage staff, but Askume could not independently confirm this.
In his Budapest home, a steel outer door encloses a small balcony, and the walls are painted with nude still lifes in pale red and orange. The inner door to his apartment was open when Askume first visited the building on Wednesday, and it was locked when reporters returned on Thursday. No one answered the doorbell.
A woman who has lived in the building for two years said Barsoni-Arcidiacono was already living there when she moved in and described him as friendly, not loud, but friendly.
The group’s organizer said she used to practice painting as a member of the Budapest Art Club, although she had not been a member of the club for some years. He said she looked more like a businesswoman than an artist, but she was very upbeat and friendly.
A classmate of Barsoni-Arcidiacono said he grew up in Santa Venerina, near Catania in eastern Sicily, in a family where his father was a worker and his mother a housewife. She described him as an extremely conservative young man.
He received his PhD in physics from UCL in the early 2000s and his thesis on the positron (a subatomic particle with the mass of an electron and a positive charge) can be found on the UCL website . But he appears to have abandoned his studies rather than pursue a scientific career.
“As far as I know, he hasn’t done any scientific research since then,” retired physicist Akos Torok, a professor at University College, with whom he published a paper at the time, told Askume by email.
For Kleinschmidt’s part, the resume he used to get the job listed additional graduate degrees in politics and development from the London School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies, but Askume was unable to verify this.
He then talked about working on NGO projects in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
In another bio on the BAC Consulting website, he describes himself as a board member of the Earth Children Institute, an educational and environmental charity in New York. Donna Goodman, the group’s founder, told Askume that Barsoni-Arcidiacono never had a role there.
“She was a friend of a friend of a board member and approached us about the job in 2018,” Goodman said. “But she was never invited to apply.”
In that resume, she was also described as a former “project manager” at the International Atomic Energy Agency from 2008 to 2009, where she organized a nuclear research conference. The IAEA said its records showed she had been an intern there for eight months.
BAC Consulting’s website went down this weekend, with the company providing little information about its actual operations in Hungary. Its registered address is a service office on the outskirts of Budapest.
“I am a scientist who uses my diverse background to work on interdisciplinary projects that inform strategic decisions (water and climate policy, investments),” Barsoni-Arcidiacono writes in her bio.
“With excellent analytical, verbal, and interpersonal skills, I enjoy working and leading in a multicultural environment that values diversity, integrity, and humor.”
