Vodafone faces court case in 'bugging' row

Parents believe their son was murdered before he could blow the whistle
Senior 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 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 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.

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 into conversations. Vodafone says it was 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.