Sehnaoui: Unauthorized Activity Detected on OGERO Mobile Network
Telecommunications Minister Nicolas Sehnaoui on Monday accused Abdul Monem Youssef, head of the OGERO telecom authority and the ministry’s director general of investment and maintenance, of seeking to suppress the truth about a mobile phone station allegedly operating outside state control.
At a press conference he held to announce the findings of a technical team tasked with probing the activities of the station, Sehnaoui said Youssef refused to grant the technical team information it had repeatedly requested concerning the controversial mobile station’s activities.
The station in question had been donated by the Chinese government to OGERO and installed on the second floor of a ministry-owned building in Beirut’s Adlieh area.
Sehnaoui accused Youssef of “persistent administrative mutiny” aimed at “hiding the truth about the phone calls made through this network over a period of four years.”
“When it entered the second floor of the ministry-owned building in the Adlieh area, the committee found the apparatus used to access the network’s central system to be malfunctioning,” Sehnaoui said, noting that “without it there’s no possibility to access the main section of the database related to the network’s activities.”
He revealed that the committee detected a “seven-minute entry to the central system on July 18, 2011.”
“After reviewing the call logs it obtained from the two telecom firms (MTC Touch and Alfa) … the committee discovered that several mobile phone lines, other than those allotted for the trial period, were used” on the OGERO network, the minister said.
He added that a “dangerous” fact was discovered by the committee, which found out that “the network’s call database pertaining to its activities from June 2010 until the inspection of records had been deleted.”
Sehnaoui said that he would submit copies of the committee’s final report to President Michel Suleiman, Speaker Nabih Berri and Premier Najib Miqati.
He also announced that he will ask cabinet to put the committee’s findings on its agenda.
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