Just yesterday, CEO Hsu Ching-kuang of Gold Apollo, the distributor of the device, held a press conference stating that the AR-924 beepers ordered by Hezbollah were manufactured under license by a company called BAC.
“The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” he said. According to a company statement, it had authorized “BAC to use our brand trademark for product sales in specific regions, but the design and manufacturing of the products are entirely handled by BAC.” The CEO also noted that there had been a problem with receiving payment from BAC and that these had come via the Middle East.
BAC Consulting Kft. in Budapest is led by Italian-born Cristiana Rosaria Bársony-Arcidiacono, who also works for the European Commission based on her LinkedIn profile.
“The company has had only one employee since its foundation in 2022, so it is completely impractical that it could have participated in the production of any weapons,” wrote Magyar Nemzet earlier.
Now, however, Telex reports that BAC Consulting Kft. acted as a simple intermediary in the transaction. The company itself has not actually performed any activities, has no office, and is only registered with a registered office provider.
The head of BAC Consulting was in contact with a Bulgarian company, Norta Global Ltd, based in Sofia. Norta Global Ltd. was actually behind the deal, although on paper it was BAC Consulting that signed the contract with Gold Apollo.
Telex says the pagers from Taiwan were not brought in by BAC Consulting, but by the Bulgarian company. Norta Global sold and shipped the devices to Hezbollah. Owned by a Norwegian, Norta Global was only registered in 2022 and on paper deals with project management.
Yesterday on X, Zoltán Kovács, the government’s international spokesman, wrote: “Authorities have confirmed that the company in question is a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site in Hungary. It has one manager registered at its declared address, and the referenced devices have never been in Hungary.”
He further added that “Hungarian national security services are cooperating with all relevant international partner agencies and organizations.”
According to another Telex source, “The Hungarian company involved in the case actually did nothing, the devices were never in Hungary.”
Meanwhile, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell has condemned the bombings and called for an investigation “due to the inevitable and heavy collateral damages among civilians, and the broader consequences for the entire population.”
