Pressure on Vodafone

MPs want firm prosecuted after ADAE points to involvement in wiretaps

The head of the parliamentary committee investigating the recent cases of phone tapping yesterday called for Vodafone, the mobile phone company at the center of the scandal, to be prosecuted immediately.

New Democracy MP Anastassios Karamarios made the assertion after the Communications Privacy Protection Authority (ADAE) handed its second interim report to the committee. The watchdog has also been looking into the matter since February.

“Based on the evidence we have seen today, a prosecutor should immediately press charges against Vodafone,” Karamarios said.

The deputy based his demand mainly on a section of the 27-page report which indicated that Vodafone employees were involved in making adjustments in January of last year to the software used to eavesdrop on some 100 mobile phones.

ADAE found that the modifications were made on the afternoon of January 24, 2005 — the same time that an error was reported with Vodafone’s SMS system as hundreds of text messages failed to reach their intended recipients.

The watchdog found that work logs from Ericsson Hellas, which was responsible for Vodafone’s technical infrastructure, showed that its technicians were at one of Vodafone’s communications centers in Paeania on the day the problem occurred.

However, the data showed that the Ericsson engineers left before the text messages started going amiss. According to ADAE, the last person to leave the center was a member of Vodafone’s staff while another five employees had remote access to the system.

Vodafone could not tell ADAE which of its employees was at the Paeania center as it had destroyed those records. This center, located within a building belonging to electronics giant Intracom, was one of four where the software had been activated.

The watchdog also found that Costas Tsalikidis, the Vodafone software engineer who allegedly committed suicide the day after the spy software was discovered, had been responsible for accepting delivery in 2003 of the software which was eventually hijacked for the illegal wiretaps.