Financial Times: Versatel, the Dutch telecoms company, on Thursday denied it was the source of an e-mail announcing that it may be bought by Deutsche Telekom, triggering legal and regulatory probes into the document’s origin. Dutch media received the e-mail, purportedly from Versatel and Talpa, an investment company that is its biggest shareholder [and the investment vehicle of Dutch billionaire entrepreneur John de Mol], shortly after midnight on Thursday and broke the news shortly after 7am.
With so much focus on blogs and the potential risks of inadvertent (or deliberate) disclosure of sensitive information, this is a timely reminder that other long-established communication channels can also be easily (mis)used to do exactly the same thing.
And this from the FT’s report:
[…] Betten Beurs Media, a financial website, and ANP, the national press association, later accepted they had acted without checking the document’s authenticity. Both agencies apologised and withdrew their stories.
So it’s not only bloggers who sometimes shoot from the hip 😉