The espionage turned fraud scandal that has dogged Renault for months has taken a new turn as French media aired secret recordings of one of the automaker’s executives begging its former security boss to help it “get out of this mess”.
“Help us to get out of this mess in one piece,” Renault’s general counsel and compliance officer Christian Husson said to Dominique Gevrey, the ex-security manager now accused of fraud in the case, in secret recordings of the meeting released by magazine L’Express and France 2 television.
The meeting between Husson, Gevrey and the company’s lawyer Jean Reinhart, took place on February 14, when Renault still believed it was a victim of industrial spying.
The automaker was eventually forced to apologise to and promise to compensate the three men it had accused and fired in the case.
“We don’t live in the world of the police, we live in a world of management, an internationally-listed company. So we’re in a mess. Help us get out of it,” Husson went on.
Gevrey for his part assured the others that he had a written report containing information about his supposed source, but that it was not in his office, but in Brussels.
“From the start, I’ve said, ‘be careful !’ What we have won’t stand up in a court,” he adds in the recording.
Renault said it was “shocking” that such a recording, which it said was made by Gevrey without the others’ knowledge, should be made public.
Renault had submitted the minutes of the meeting, which was called to make Gevrey reveal his source and cooperate with the police, to the authorities, it said in an emailed statement.
Reinhart told Reuters on Wednesday the conversation had planted the first seeds of doubt about Gevrey.
“We came out of the meeting and we said to ourselves, ‘this guy is taking us for a ride,’. We could no longer exclude the possibility of fraud,” he said.
Investors shrugged off the revelations and bid up the automaker’s shares 2.4 percent, making it the day’s top gainer among European car companies. So far this year, though, Renault’s shares are the sector’s biggest decliners.
French industry minister Eric Besson has said he is against “destabilising” the company in the face of questions over whether Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn, who is also head of alliance partner Nissan Motor, should keep his job after the scandal.
Ghosn and Chief Operating Officer Patrick Pelata said they would forgo their 2010 bonuses because of the affair, which has embarrassed the company and the government – Renault is 15 percent state-owned.
Pelata tendered his resignation earlier this month but Ghosn refused to accept it.
In a related development, police on Monday interviewed as a witness a Belgian man named by Gevrey as his source, who said he had never passed any information to Gevrey, website Mediapart reported.
An independent magistrate is trying to determine if other people were involved in the affair and to find the money Renault paid, part of which is in Swiss bank accounts belonging to Gevrey.
Michel Luc, an employee of a private security company, was also placed under investigation last week after serving as an intermediary to help Gervey organise what he said was the paying of his source. Luc has been released on bail.
CONCERNS over the way ASIO handles its paperwork have been revealed by the spy agency’s watchdog.
Since 2008, the Inspector General of Intelligence Security has been investigating “deficiencies in record keeping” at the domestic espionage organisation.
The findings, in response to questions asked in a parliamentary committee by Liberal senator Russell Trood, are likely to worry Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd among others.
“The record-keeping deficiencies,” says the inspector Vivienne Thom, relate to “the disclosure of information to authorised foreign authorities”.
What ASIO is telling other nations is not clear, nor why paperwork is not being kept.
Senator Trood has asked Dr Thom if her office would continue to watch ASIO’s management of paperwork.
“Staff have and will continue to regularly review relevant ASIO records so that we might be satisfied that decision-making and record-keeping practices are proper and appropriate and accord with all internal policy requirements.”
The agency has declined repeatedly to comment on a security incident at its massive new headquarters building, which is being built near Parliament House.
A 19-year-old man was injured and stuck in a hole after breaching night security at the site earlier in March.
Cairo, Egypt (CNN) — It is an anguished mother’s appeal to a distant president, who has been using deadly force to crush an uprising.
“At least let someone talk to him, let someone see him,” the woman says, her voice cracking with emotion, her eyes filling with tears. “I want to see my son. I have no idea where he is!”
The last time Maha Radwan saw her son Muhammad was when he unexpectedly appeared on Syrian state television last Saturday, labeled a member of a “foreign group paid to destabilize Syria.”
The 32-year old Egyptian-American sat stiffly on a couch, answering questions in what appeared to be a televised interrogation. The Syrian anchorwoman introducing the report described it as a “confession.”
Radwan admitted he had exchanged e-mails with someone in Colombia who tried to hire him to take photos of events in Syria.
“How much were they paying you for these photos?” the interrogator asks.
“Approximately 100 Egyptian pounds (around $17),” Radwan answers in Arabic.
“Have you visited Israel at any time?” the interrogator asks at another point.A closer look at Bashar al-Assad
“I went to meet a friend in the West Bank,” Radwan responds, saying he traveled on his American passport.
Radwan’s mother says she was dumb-founded when she saw the video for the first time. It took time for the implications of the televised “confession” to sink in. Her son was now a prisoner of Syria’s much-feared security services, agencies with a well-documented history of torture and human rights abuses.
“The Syrian government did not charge him with anything yet officially,” Radwan’s mother says, “You know what? They left that to the media. They put that video together, and one of the channels picked it up and turned the whole thing into espionage.”
Syrian authorities have not allowed any contact between lawyers or Egyptian or American diplomats and their son — saying only that he is being “investigated.”
Muhammad Radwan was born and raised in Houston, Texas, the son of affluent Egyptian parents employed by the Saudi Arabian oil giant Aramco.
After graduating with an engineering degree from Texas AM University, Radwan worked for several years in Saudi Arabia, before taking a year off to back-pack across Latin America. On his Twitter account, Radwan describes himself as an “engineer to international vagabond to engr…cyclic.”
Last April, Radwan went back to work, this time working for an oil company in Syria. But in January 2011, Radwan rushed to Cairo to join the protests in Tahrir Square against Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Friends posted a photograph of him on a “Free Radwan” web-site, after he had been shot in the forehead with buck-shot during clashes with Egyptian security forces. Relatives say he wore a wool hat for days to hide the wound from his mother.
After the overthrow of Mubarak, Radwan gave an interview to the Voice of America along with several Egyptian revolutionaries. He described how protesters had organized themselves, in anticipation of a government crackdown.
“They actually went into certain neighborhoods, timed how long it would take for different neighborhoods to eventually congregate, at the point where they figured security forces would face them,” Radwan says, speaking in fluent, American-accented English.
Syrian state television has used parts of the VOA report, to accuse Radwan of trying to export Egypt’s revolution to Syria.
“They’re using him as a scapegoat to parade him on TV,” says Radwan’s cousin Nora Shalaby.
“It happened in Tunisia, then in Egypt, and in Libya, and its all the same in Bahrain and Yemen. Always blame it on ‘foreign elements.’ It’s a ridiculous accusation.”
According to his Twitter account, Radwan was following the growing protests in Syria, remarking at one point that the atmosphere reminded him of the revolutionary fervor in Egypt last January. His final tweet, posted on March 25, appears to have been hastily typed from Damascus’ landmark Umayyad Mosque, where anti-government protesters were demonstrating.
“Umayid mosque #syria just turned upside down, pro anti rwgome crash,” he wrote.
Radwan’s father traveled to Damascus last week, to lobby Syrian authorities for information on his son’s whereabouts. Meanwhile Maha Radwan is mobilizing supporters here in Cairo.
On Thursday, she stood quietly with more than fifty relatives and friends in front of the gates of the Syrian Embassy. Armed only with “Free Radwan” signs and flowers, the small crowd stood in silence, facing a photo on the embassy wall showing a smiling Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
After more than an hour, the Syrian ambassador stepped out to address the crowd.
Yusuf Al-Ahmad said it would take time to process Radwan, because he was one of several suspects detained at Friday prayers.
“He also stressed that it was Radwan who confessed and that he was obviously not subjected to any means of torture to do so,” says Shalaby, Radwan’s cousin, casting doubt on everything the ambassador said.
In Breaking In, Odette Annable, right, leads Contra Security colleagues on a mission. Images courtesy CBS
The hackers in new comedy Breaking In look as though they spend more time at the gym than they do hunched over a computer. Hollywood-handsome, these sitcom tech wizards may not walk the awkward nerd walk, but they do get to work in an office anchored by Captain Kirk’s Star Trek chair.
Debuting Wednesday, Breaking In centers on geeky high-tech consultants hired by clients to detect breaches in their security systems. In an era rife with institutional larceny, leaky intelligence and high-level buffoonery, it’s one of several TV shows that are in no mood to present espionage in an entirely serious light.
NBC’s Chuck, for example, casts an everyday schlub as a key player in intelligence operations. CBS’ new dramedy Chaos, titled in homage to Maxwell Smart’s nemeses at KAOS, offers up operatives practiced in the craft of cynical asides. FX Network’s animated Archer showcases doofus spies, while USA Network’s Burn Notice equips its former CIA agents with expertise in pyrotechnics, surveillance and wisecracks.
They all operate in the somber shadow of 24’s relentless antiterrorist Jack Bauer, the grim character whose exploits defined for nearly a decade the deadly earnest anxieties faced by Americans in the early post-9/11 years. But the strain of eternal vigilance took its toll by the time Fox’s action series ended its run last May. Now espionage programs lean on goofy, Get Smart-style attitude more than earnest patriotism.
It’s no wonder that prime time wants to look at the lighter side of spycraft: The real thing is too damn depressing. Last year, AMC’s Rubicon offered a deeply researched portrait of analysts at a secret think tank trying to decipher the daily deluge of “chatter” and satellite surveillance in order to pre-empt terrorist acts. Before the show got cancelled after a single season, the characters succumbed to alcoholic relapses, medication, suicide and vacant-eyed despair.
For audiences mired in a scam-fueled economy manipulated by con artists operating at the highest corporate levels — see Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job — a little levity goes a long way. Hence, the popularity of revenge fantasy Leverage: The TNT series keeps it light for each week’s mission conducted by witty rogues who turn the tables on big-money fraudsters.
In the case of Breaking In, the skullduggery is contracted out to the very private Contra Security, run by the mysterious Oz (played by Christian Slater). Oz recruits 27-year-old perpetual college student Cameron (Bret Harrison), who hacked his way into an extra-large dorm room by registering as twins. Blackmailed into working for Contra, Cameron rips off a car dealer as his first assignment.
Breaking In downplays the heists and skips over the “how’d they do that?” trickery. Instead, most of the show’s intermittently funny shtick draws on Cameron’s wobbly rapport with sexy safecracker Melanie, portrayed by Odette Annable (The Unborn) and sci-fi/fantasy freak Cash (Alphonso McAuley), a Dragon-Con devotee who believes his friends are “speaking Hobbit.”
Breaking In shares its Comic-Con worldview, and its three-dudes-and-a-babe casting template, with The Big Bang Theory. But the CBS geek-com starring Emmy-nominated Jim Parsons presents a more convincing group portrait of brainy misfits, as does BBC America’s The IT Crowd.
“Breaking In is actually a mouthpiece for my geeky agenda,” the show’s co-creator Adam F. Goldberg (one of the writers of Fanboys) said in a statement. “Stuff my wife won’t let me talk about outside the house: Star Wars, Goonies, Tron, Lord of the Rings.”
Still, geek cred is beside the point for Breaking In and its frothy ilk. Cybercrime is no laughing matter — just ask the nearly 2 million people who this week learned their private records were compromised by hackers who hit Epsilon Data Management. Rather than stinging viewers with grim, headline-sourced procedurals, the espionage lite genre suits these data-addled times with its laugh-to-keep-from-crying sensibility.
Breaking In debuts Wednesday at 9:30 p.m./8:30 p.m. Central on Fox.
Global security firm Symantec also agreed that such attacks are on the rise. “Cases of corporate espionage are certainly increasing in India.
“By persistent attack on the company, cyber criminals get access to intellectual property of the firms. Such data is potentially used by competition,” said Shantanu Ghosh, Vice-President, India Product Operations, Symantec.
He added that other than losing important data, the attacks have financial implications too.
According to a study by Symantec’s State of Enterprise Security Survey 2010, the average revenue lost by Indian enterprises due to cyber attacks was over Rs. 58 lakh. Image: Corporate espionage is increasing in India. Photographs: Reuters
