France: Eutelsat Conference Raises Questions from Angry Shareholders

On the afternoon of November 6th, a Eutelsat shareholder conference was held in Neuilly France. As it was the last conference of 2008, near 200 shareholders from all over the world attended. At the same time, nearly a hundred supporters of the New Tang Dynasty TV (NTDTV) protested outside the conference venue, requesting the satellite company to resume the channel’s broadcast to Asia.

After the conference concluded, a reporter interviewed several shareholders. One of them told the reporter that the first topic of Eutelsat CEO Giuliano Berretta’s speech was “the Suspension of NTDTV Broadcast” and it was a prepared speech. Evidently, the top executives could no longer hide this issue from the company’s shareholders. At the conference, one shareholder questioned the CEO on this issue and said that Eutelsat did a good thing for Chinese people by broadcasting NTDTV programmes and yet the move to suspend the broadcast in last June was to please the Chinese Communist regime.

Another shareholder told the conference attendants that the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs had confirmed the allegations made by the Reporters without Borders, which pointed out in July that Eutelsat suspended the broadcast to please the Chinese Communist regime.

According to quite a few shareholders Eutelsat CEO over-reacted to questions on this topic. He often gave unrelated answers and tried a couple of times to prevent questions of this kind from being raised.