Italian Newspaper Corriere Della Sera: EU questions Eutelsat

On August 22nd, Italy’s largest daily newspaper Corriere Della Sera published Nino Luca’s article entitled “Chinese free speech, NTDTV broadcast blocked, EU questions Eutelsat”.

The article said that the NTDTV broadcast signal to Asia has been blocked since June 16th. For nearly three months, NTDTV's broadcast cannot be seen in the Asian region. It is believed that, through its Ambassador to Italy, the Chinese Communist regime places the pressure on Eutelsat and this resulted in NTDTV broadcast being blocked.

The article quoted the content of the recording confirmed that, on July 16th, Sun Yuxi, the PRC Ambassador to Italy, admitted on the telephone that he had placed pressure on Eutelsat and ask for the blockage of NTDTV broadcast. NTDTV has its headquarters in New York and reporter stations in major cities in Europe.

The article also said that, according to the evidence from WOIPFG, the pressure from the CCP Ambassador resulted in NTDTV broadcast being interrupted on it can not be received and watched in most of the Asian region, over two million Chinese people cannot receive and watch the programmes which they have watched for over four years.

In this connection, Eutelsat explained that it is a technical problem in W5 satellite, so it has to reduce the use of a transponder. Eutelsat's remarks were refuted by the evidence of a telephone recording published by Reporters without Borders on July 10th. In this telephone recording, a staff member from Eutelsat admitted in a telephone conversation that the close of NTDTV's signal was premeditated due to economic and political reasons, not a technical failure.

The telephone recordings of the Eutelsat staff and the Chinese Ambassador made the situation clearer. The recording of the Chinese Ambassador can be heard on the website of WOIPFG (http://upholdjustice.org): "When they (Eutelsat) got this thing done, we gave them full support and told them not to worry about this issue," the above remarks were said by the Chinese Ambassador to investigator from WOIPFG.

The interruption of the satellite signal is for exchange of commercial interests. The Chinese Ambassador admitted in the same recording that, as the return of the closure of NTDTV broadcast, Eutelsat requested to “strengthen the relationship with China’s CCTV”, they want to have some cooperation with China’s space industry in the areas of satellite communications and a meteorological satellite. They want to hire our rockets to launch their satellites." According to Reporters without Borders, it is the exchange of profits between Eutelsat the Chinese authority. In order to obtain huge contracts, Eutelsat yielded to the CCP’s pressure. The spokesman from the Executive Committee of European Commission expressed that the European Commission has understood this situation and sent a letter to Eutelsat to ask them to explain the incident. A reporter from Corriere Della Sera made a phone call directly to Mr. Beretta, the CEO of Eutelsat to ask for more detailed information about this incident. The response was Mr. Beretta is on holiday. Phone calls to the Chinese Ambassador are on answering machine all the time.

NTDTV has made a strong protest, and launched a signature campaign on the Internet, and received wide support.