Cristiana Barsoni-Archidiacono speaks seven languages, has a doctorate in particle physics, amazing paints and traveled a lot in Africa and Europe.
The explosions of pagers and then walkie-talkies in Lebanon are already being called one of Israel's most spectacular operations against Hezbollah, while Israel denies involvement in the gadget explosions, President Yitzhak Herzog said. Meanwhile, it turned out that such a specific product as pagers was supplied by a company in Hungary, which bought a license from Taiwan's Gold Apollo. 49-year-old Christiana Barsoni-Archidiacono managed the company in Hungary. And she turned out to be an incredibly interesting person. This is reported by Reuters.
According to 49-year-old Christiana Barsoni-Archidiacono, the Italian-Hungarian CEO and owner of the Hungarian consulting company BAC, she was not the one who blew up the pagers in Lebanon, as a result of which 12 people died and more than 4,000 were taken injuries.
After it was revealed that her company licensed the design of the pagers from their original Taiwanese manufacturer, Gold Apollo, Barsoni-Archidiacono told NBC News that she did not make them.
“I'm just a middleman. I think you were wrong”, — she said.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's government has also previously stated that BAC Consulting is a “trade brokerage company that has no production or other sites in Hungary”.
Cristiana Barsoni-Archidiacono is known to speak seven languages, draw well and has a doctorate in physics. And everyone who knows her describes her as sweet and friendly.
Since then, she has not appeared in public. Neighbors say they haven't seen her. Barsoni-Archidiacono did not respond to calls and emails from Reuters, and her apartment in a grand old building in Budapest, where the lobby door was opened earlier this week, was shuttered.
The woman who lives in the building for the past two years, said Barsoni-Archidiacono was already living here when she moved in, and described her as kind and friendly.
According to the organizer of the group, she was engaged in painting as part of the Budapest Art Club, although she had not visited it for several years. She was more like a businesswoman than an artist, he said, but was upbeat and sociable.
On Saturday, September 21, the Hungarian government said its intelligence services had conducted several interrogations of Barsoni-Archidiacono. after the explosions.
The Hungarian government said Wednesday that BAC Consulting is a “trading company” that has no production site in the country, and that the “explosive pagers” have never been in Hungary.
Conversations with acquaintances and former colleagues her work paints a picture of a woman with an impressive intellect and a career that allowed her to travel the world, she also changed jobs frequently.
200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000An acquaintance of hers, who, like others, knew her in social circles in Budapest, asked not to be named, but called Christiana “kind, but without a business streak.” According to the person, she gave the impression of someone who is always enthusiastic about trying new things and easily believes in new things.
Kilian Kleinschmidt, a veteran former UN humanitarian aid administrator who hired Barsoni-Archidiacono in 2019 for head of a six-month Dutch-funded program to train Libyans in Tunisia in subjects such as hydroponics, IT and business development, called her hiring a “big mistake”, saying he fired her before her contract was up.
A schoolmate of Barsoni-Archidiacono said she grew up with a working father and a housewife mother in Santa Venerina, near Catania in eastern Sicily, and attended high school nearby. He described her as a rather reserved child.
In the early 2000s, she earned a PhD in physics from University College London, where her thesis on positrons — subatomic particles with the mass of an electron and a positive charge — still available on the UCL website. But apparently she left without continuing her scientific career.
“As far as I know, she hasn't done any scientific work since then,” — Akosh Torok, a retired physicist who was one of her professors at UCL and published papers with her at the time, told Reuters by email.
The resume she used to get the Kleinschmidt job included references for other master's degrees in politics and development from the London School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies.
She then described a number of jobs related to NGO projects in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
In a separate resume on the BAC Consulting website, she described herself as a “board member of the Earth Child Institute,” an educational and environmental charity in New York. The group's founder, Donna Goodman, told Reuters that Barsoni-Archidiacono had never held any position there.
“She was a friend of a friend of a board member and contacted us about the vacancy. But she was never invited to apply in 2018,” — Goodman said.
The resume also described her as a former “project manager” at the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2008-2009, which organized a conference on nuclear research. The IAEA said that, according to its records, she was an intern there for eight months.
On the website of BAC Consulting, which was shut down by the end of this week, the company gave little information about its actual business in Hungary. Her registered address — serviced office in the suburbs of Budapest.
“I am a scientist who uses my diverse experience to work on interdisciplinary projects for strategic decision-making (water and climate policy, investments)”, — wrote Barsoni-Archidiacono on her resume.
She also noted that, with “excellent analytical, language and communication skills,” she enjoys working in a multicultural environment where a sense of humor is valued.