Telekom Manager Arrested
December 18, 2008
German authorities have arrested one suspect in connection with a surveillance scandal at Deutsche Telekom. The suspect was arrested last week because authorities feared he would leave the country indefinitely, Fred Apostel, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office in Bonn, said Wednesday, Dec. 17.
The suspect, identified only as Klaus T., is accused of paying to have members of Telekom's supervisory board and journalists spied on and of monitoring manager's call records to track possible leaks. As former head of Telekom's division for internal investigations, T. may have also engaged in fraud and embezzlement, according to the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
Prosecutors are pursuing a case against eight people in the surveillance scandal, which dates back to 2005 and 2006. Apostel said T. will remain in custody pending the completion of the investigation.
Deutsche Telekom is the largest telecommunications company in the European Union. Scandal seems to following the giant recently. In October the company confirmed that personal information of 17 million mobile costumers had been stolen.