Magyar Telekom CEO says alleged bribe report ‘inaccurate’

The chief executive of Hungarian incumbent Magyar Telekom, Christopher Mattheisen, says a recent report in the UK Financial Times alleging bribery at the company’s foreign units is ‘inaccurate’, and added that press reports linking the operator with a Russian takeover bid are wrong. The newspaper carried a story yesterday that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has launched an inquiry into whether the Hungarian firm had breached the rules of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act via contracts at several international units. However, Mattheisen dismissed what he says is an inaccurate and misleading article. ‘There is nothing new in the story that you would have read in the press today … Now there is nothing new so the headline of the FT article … you could have said that a year ago,’ Mattheisen said. ‘A charge is made here in the first paragraph of the story about suspected bribery. That is entirely … inaccurate,’ he added.