Gold Apollo’s places of work in northern Taiwan.
Emily Feng/NPR
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Emily Feng/NPR
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Entrepreneur Hsu Ching-kuang was as soon as lauded in Taiwan for resuscitating the archaic digital pager, partly by pivoting into gross sales to international governments. At one level, he claimed his firm, Gold Apollo, dominated 99% of the Dutch pager market and even counted the FBI as a shopper.
However on Wednesday, he confronted an onslaught of cops and journalists outdoors his workplace in northern Taiwan, after Gold Apollo was linked to lots of of pagers belonging to members of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah that concurrently exploded Tuesday throughout Lebanon and in elements of Syria, which Lebanon’s well being minister says killed 12 individuals and injured almost 3,000. A U.S. official informed NPR that Israel informed the U.S. it carried out the assault. The Israeli authorities has not commented publicly.
Hsu confirmed it was his firm’s model on the pagers. “This is very embarrassing,” he stated. Shortly after, greater than a dozen Taiwan cops and metropolis officers entered his firm workplace for investigation.
Hsu denied all involvement with the explosive pagers, telling NPR outdoors his workplace in northern Taiwan that it was a Budapest-based firm referred to as BAC Consulting which manufactured the units.
“There was nothing in those devices that we had manufactured or exported to them [BAC],” Hsu stated, noting the pagers “were entirely different” from his designs and contained a chip that Gold Apollo doesn’t use in its personal pagers.
Reuters and The New York Instances have reported the pagers have been finally planted by Israel, citing Lebanese and U.S. officers. However how and when the units have been modified to turn into deadly remains to be unclear.
The pagers’ hyperlink to comparatively unknown corporations spanning Asia and Europe suggests a plot years within the making.
A European alternative
Three years in the past, Hsu says he was approached by a Taiwanese lady Hsu says he solely knew as “Teresa” who claimed to be an area consultant for a Hungarian firm named BAC Consulting.
After greater than two months of negotiation with Teresa, Hsu agreed to signal a contract to promote Gold Apollo’s pagers to BAC and moreover, to let BAC use Gold Apollo’s trademark on his personal merchandise.
“She had already flown several times to Europe to contact [her colleagues],” says Hsu. He says he was additionally informed BAC additionally had pursuits in East Africa: “From beginning to end, they never mentioned Lebanon.”
Annual experiences for the final two years, downloaded from the Hungarian Ministry of Justice’s on-line enterprise registration portal, confirmed that the agency was registered in Could 2022, and the one proprietor of BAC is called as Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono. The corporate’s most up-to-date annual accounts, signed in Could of this 12 months, document a stability sheet of barely greater than $320.
Bársony-Arcidiacono’s LinkedIn profile describes her as a “CEO, strategic Advisor & Business Developer,” and features a hyperlink for BAC Consulting. On one other skilled networking website, she is listed as a “freelance expert in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development.”
“If you have a challenge and you like to think out of the box, bring it to me and we will solve it together,” Bársony-Arcidiacono told a jobs website this February. “A good understanding of local issues and a network of collaborators in various areas are important to succeed.”
A cellphone number belonging to a person with the same profile photo as Bársony-Arcidiacono’s Linkedin page was unavailable when dialed by an NPR reporter.
“Strange” payments
About a year after BAC signed a contract with Gold Apollo, Hsu says they came back to him with an unusual request: they wanted to design their own products but put his company’s trademark on them.
“They said they wanted to cultivate a cohort of engineers,” Hsu says he remembers BAC telling him. “I told them, the stuff you make is neither easy to use nor is it aesthetically-pleasing. Why not just use my products?”
Hsu also noticed their payment transfers were “strange.”
While BAC is located in the capital of Hungary, Hsu said the company paid Gold Apollo from a Middle Eastern bank account that was blocked at least once by their bank in Taiwan.
“It was very inconvenient. You have to deal with these risks when doing global trade,” remembers Hsu. He says his accountant spent a whole week working to unfreeze the cost.
The final time Gold Apollo shipped elements to BAC was earlier this 12 months, Hsu stated. The “AR-924” mannequin pagers that exploded in Lebanon and Syria have been new and had been just lately acquired by Hezbollah in February, the Related Press reported.
Hsu is adamant not one of the exploding pagers have been made in Taiwan by his firm: “We did not make these devices, and we did not export a single one of them [to BAC],” he insists.
Taiwan’s ministry of financial affairs says it has no document of any Taiwan corporations exporting pagers on to Lebanon between 2022 and 2024 and deemed Gold Apollo’s pagers “modified after being exported,” based on a press release. NPR was unable to confirm the ministry’s evaluation.
Willem Marx contributed to this report.
