Telecom Italia - CIA - suicides - electronic surveillance - Rupert Murdoch

Telecom Italia, was completely privatized in 1997,it dominates the Italian market with 70% of the fixed-line business. It is the 6th biggest Italian company by market value. It is at the centre of a scandal, such as only the Italians can brew.

Olimpia holding company - owned by Chairman Marco Tronchetti Provera and Bennetton - controls TI with an 18 percent stake which they built up in 2001.

TI is heavily leveraged, with debts of about 41 billion euros ($52 billion including the 14 billion euros ($17.7 billion) it spent 18 months ago to buy the rest of TIM the remaining Italian based mobile player.

On September 11th -TI announced it planned to chop its mobile and fixed-line units into separate businesses "to focus on content" contrary to the belief by the rest of the world market in "convergence" - this was an unexpected change of strategy that appeared to signal the sale of TIM.(see FOOTNOTE)

Prime Minister Romano Prodi was outraged because he hadn't been consulted....but , Angelo Rovati a close Prodi adviser, resigned when 2 newspapers obtained a document recommending that the Italian State buy back a part of Telecom Italia. Rovati said he had acted on his own, without informing Prodi.

Berlusconi (Italy's richest man - and very good friend of Tony Blair) was fingered as a buyer of TI but said he wasn't in the business of buying other people's debts.

Then last week 21 arrests were made, bank accounts frozen, with tales of the state using TI to spy on 100,000 Italians, prosecutors have linked secret bank accounts in Monte Carlo to both Tronchetti Provera (who has now quit - see pic from Republicca) and to Telecom Italia’s chief executive, Carlo Buora , according to the La Repubblica newspaper.

Among those arrested were

1. Giuliano Tavaroli, the head of security for Telecom Italia until May 2005
2. Pierguido Iezzi, the current head of security for Pirelli.
3. Emanuele Cipriani, who runs a private investigation company called Polis d'Istinto in Florence.

Milan prosecutors also Swiss and Luxenbourg ank accounts that contained €15 Mn. (US$19 Mn.), and sequestered a house in Florence worth €2 million.

Giuliano Tavaroli occupied the key national position to which were passed all authorized requests by magistrates to make wiretaps, resigned and was under investigation by the Milan Prosecutors for association in violating privacy.

In the computers of Emanuele Cipriani, the magistrates have found a huge archive of files regarding magistrates, political persons, football players and referees - all the major figures in the recent scandals in Italy. Apparently, wiretaps that could have been used to blackmail them were also found during the investigation.

TIM it transpires had an anti-fraud program for the mobile phone network called RADAR the system had a "flaw" that allowed hackers to enter the Telecom system without leaving a trace and was capable of recording sensitive information about millions of Italians. RADAR was was run by a man called Adamo Bove, an investigation cop and a leading expert on electronic surveillance.

According to Paolo Biondani of the Corriere ( confirmed in detail by the Repubblica) that according to testimony by Bove's ex-colleagues in Milan, it was Adamo Bove who helped the Milan magistrates identify and reconstruct the mobile phone traffic during the kidnapping of Abu Omar in Milan on February 17, 2003. It was this crucial investigative work that led to arrest warrants for 26 American (CIA ?) agents and many of their Italian accomplices. It was Bove's boss Giuliano Tavaroli who was implicated as a source of information via the Secret Service (SISMI) which enabled his kidnap.

On Friday June 21st 2006, just after 12 noon, Adamo Bove fell to his death on a motorway in Naples. He had just left his wife to do some errands in town while he headed home. On an overpass he stopped his car, put on the emergency lights, and apparently jumped to his death, presumably making sure there were no oncoming vehicles on the highway some thirty meters below him.

The reflexive verb in Italian , suicidarsi, "to kill oneself," can be used in its rare transitive form, suicidare, as in "Bove was suicided by the CIA."

Vide - The Greek counterpart of Bove who discovered tapping of Greek politicians mobiles - eavesdropping was transmitted in real time via four antennae located near the U.S. embassy in Athens, according to an 11-month Greek government investigation. Some of these transmissions were sent to a phone in Laurel, Md., near America's National Security Agency.

In March 2005, Costas Tsalikidis, a 38-year-old software engineer for Vodaphone in Greece had just discovered a highly sophisticated bug embedded in the company's mobile network. The spyware eavesdropped on the prime minister's and other top officials' cell phone calls including the car phone of Greece's secret service chief. Others bugged included civil rights activists, the head of Greece's "Stop the War" coalition, journalists and Arab businessmen based in Athens. All the wiretapping began about two months before the Olympics were hosted by Greece in August 2004.

Tsalikidis, according to friends and family, was excited about his work and was looking forward to marrying his longtime girlfriend. On March 9, 2005, his elderly mother found him hanging from a white rope tied to pipes outside of his apartment bathroom. His limp feet dangled a mere three inches above the floor.

Vodaphone's top executive in Greece reported to the Prime Minister that unknown outsiders had illicitly eavesdropped on top government officials. Before making his report, however, the CEO had the spyware destroyed, even though this destroyed the evidence as well.

FOOTNOTE

The (prospective) buyer of TIM - the TI mobile network ? Mr Rupert Murdoch, US Citizen.

Watch this space....FT Story October 4th 2006 interview with Marco Tronchetti Provera, which confirms that Prodi knew what was going on, and that Rupert Murdoch was in the frame to buy TIM.