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British managers of Vodafone are facing a private lawsuit from the family of a former employee, who claim that he was murdered to stop him from revealing a major phone-tapping scandal.
According to the family's lawyer, the case, which has raised troubling questions about the ability of third
parties to eavesdrop on private phone conversations, threatens to highlight the actions of several senior Vodafone employees in the days leading up to the death of 38-year-old Costas Tsalikidis.
The dead man's family fear that Tsalikidis, a technician with Vodafone in Greece, stumbled across a plot to listen in to private conversations of the Greek Prime Minister and a number of other top-ranking officials during the run-up to the Athens Olympics in 2004 and that those who were conducting the bugging operation took steps to silence him.
Tsalikidis's family have never accepted the findings of an inquiry that found he hanged himself, apparently because of pressure of work. They suspect he was poisoned and are now petitioning to have his body exhumed for tests.
The family's lawyer, Themistokles Sofos, is set to hire forensics expert Dr Michael Baden, who gave testimony in the OJ Simpson trial, to examine the poisoning claims.
The family say Tsalikidis was not the type to take his life and that he was, until the weeks before his death, a happy man looking forward to marrying his fiancee. They say he tried to resign 20 days before his death, but this was rejected by Vodafone. The day before he died, Tsalikidis sent two detailed emails to senior Vodafone employees, the contents of which have never been divulged.
Now the family is launching a private legal action to recover all of Tsalikidis's emails, which they claim have been removed illegally by Vodafone. The move threatens to expose who, if anyone, in the company was aware of the bugging plot. It will also reignite interest in a story that gripped Athens in the weeks after Tsalikidis was found dead in his loft apartment on March 9, 2005. His death triggered a public furore in Greece, with lurid speculation that he had been silenced. In the days leading up to his death Tsalikidis had told his fiancee that something was badly wrong at the company and confided in a friend that his need to leave the company had become a "matter of life or death". He also kept a technical diary that contained a note titled "if something goes wrong".
Sofos says he has evidence that, several days before his death, a number of British Vodafone employees travelled to Athens to question Tsalikidis.
He claims to know the executives' identities, raising the prospect that they will be named in the lawsuit, something that could prove embarrassing to the company, which has always denied colluding with third parties to bug the Vodafone network.
"We have a witness who testified to the prosecutor that British superiors of Vodafone came to Greece and met the company's management in the days before Costas died," Sofos said. "We asked the prosecutor's office to call them to give evidence, but they never did."
The day after Tsalikidis's death, the head of Vodafone in Greece informed the Prime Minister's office that it had discovered rogue software had been installed on its network, which allowed a third party to listen in to private conversations. Vodafone says it was first alerted to the problem after being tipped off by engineers working for one of its technical suppliers.
But despite an official inquiry the identity of those who perpetrated the phone-taps has never emerged. The inquiry found that the private conversations of some of Greece's most important politicians and officials, conducted on more than 100 mobile phones, had been sent to "shadow" mobile phones and recorded on computers. Experts have been able to pinpoint the locations of many of the shadow phones which, it is claimed, correlate to a number of properties rented by the US Government.
Sofos says he is convinced that Tsalikidis was murdered. Vodafone declined to comment.
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