2024-09-18 17:10:03
Gold Apollo’s offices in northern Taiwan.
Emily Feng/NPR
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Emily Feng/NPR
TAIPEI, Taiwan – Entrepreneur Hsu Ching-kuang was once lauded in Taiwan for resuscitating the archaic electronic pager, in part by pivoting into sales to foreign governments. At one point, he claimed his company, Gold Apollo, dominated 99% of the Dutch pager market and even counted the FBI as a client.
But on Wednesday, he faced an onslaught of police officers and journalists outside his office in northern Taiwan, after Gold Apollo was linked to hundreds of pagers belonging to members of the militant group Hezbollah and which killed at least nine people when they simultaneously exploded across Lebanon and Syria.
Hsu confirmed it was his company’s brand on the pagers. “This is very embarrassing,” he said. Shortly after, more than a dozen Taiwan police officers and city officials entered his company office for investigation.
Hsu denied all involvement with the explosive pagers, telling NPR outside his office in northern Taiwan that it was a Budapest-based company called BAC Consulting which manufactured the devices.
“There was nothing in those devices that we had manufactured or exported to them [BAC],” Hsu said, noting the pagers “were entirely different” from his designs and contained a chip that Gold Apollo does not use in its own pagers.
Reuters and the New York Times report the pagers were ultimately planted by Israel, citing Lebanese and American officials. But how and when the devices were modified to become lethal is still unclear.
The pagers’ link to relatively-unknown companies spanning Asia and Europe suggests a plot years in the making.
A European opportunity
Three years ago, Hsu says he was approached by a Taiwanese woman Hsu says he only knew as “Teresa” who claimed to be a local representative for a Hungarian company named BAC Consulting.
After more than two months of negotiation with Teresa, Hsu agreed to sign a contract to sell Gold Apollo’s pagers to BAC and additionally, to let BAC use Gold Apollo’s trademark on his own products.
“She had already flown several times to Europe to contact [her colleagues],” says Hsu. He says he was also told BAC also had interests in East Africa: “From beginning to end, they never mentioned Lebanon.”
Annual reports for the last two years, downloaded from the Hungarian Ministry of Justice’s online business registration portal, showed that the firm was registered in May 2022, and the single owner of BAC is named as Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono. The company’s most recent annual accounts, signed in May of this year, record a balance sheet of slightly more than $320.
Bársony-Arcidiacono’s LinkedIn profile describes her as a “CEO, strategic Advisor & Business Developer,” and includes a link for BAC Consulting. On another professional networking site, 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 cell phone 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 an entire week working to unfreeze the payment.
The last time Gold Apollo shipped components to BAC was earlier this year, Hsu said. The “AR-924” model pagers that exploded in Lebanon and Syria were new and had been recently acquired by Hezbollah in February, the Associated Press reported.
Hsu is adamant none of the exploding pagers were made in Taiwan by his company: “We did not make these devices, and we did not export a single one of them [to BAC],” he insists.
Taiwan’s ministry of economic affairs says it has no record of any Taiwan companies exporting pagers directly to Lebanon between 2022 and 2024 and deemed Gold Apollo’s pagers “modified after being exported,” according to a statement. NPR was unable to verify the ministry’s assessment.
Willem Marx contributed to this report.
