The Deutsche Telekom eavesdropping controversy became public at the end of May 2008 through an article in the weekly, Der Spiegel

Der Spiegel

Der Spiegel is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. It is one of Europe's largest publications of its kind, with a weekly circulation of more than one million.-Overview:...

. The prosecutor

Prosecutor

The prosecutor is the chief legal representative of the prosecution in countries with either the common law adversarial system, or the civil law inquisitorial system...

 in Bonn

Bonn

Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....

 has initiated investigations against eight former members of Deutsche Telekom

Deutsche Telekom

Deutsche Telekom AG is a telecommunications company headquartered in Bonn, Germany. It is the largest telecommunications company in Europe....

's advisory board

Advisory board

An advisory board is a body that advises the board of directors and management of a corporation but does not have authority to vote on corporate matters, nor a legal fiduciary responsibility...

, executive board and former employees. The investigation focuses on alleged eavesdropping

Eavesdropping

Eavesdropping is the act of secretly listening to the private conversation of others without their consent, as defined by Black's Law Dictionary...

 against journalists and members of the supervisory executive boards of Deutsche Telekom, allegedly initiated by then chairman of the supervisory board Klaus Zumwinkel

Klaus Zumwinkel

Klaus Peter Richard Otto Zumwinkel was Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Deutsche Post between 1990 and 2008. Being under suspicion of tax fraud, he resigned from office on February 15, 2008...

 and then CEO Kai-Uwe Ricke. The objective of the eavesdropping was to find out who had leaked confidential information about planned lay-offs and acquisitions to the media in 2005 and 2006. According to German law half the members of the advisory board of large publicly listed companies have to be representatives of the employees. These were apparently suspected of having leaked the information.

René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom, cooperated with the public prosecutor, handing over relevant information and allowing his offices to be searched. Moreover, Obermann called on the prestigious former federal judge Gerhard Schäfer to assist Deutsche Telekom in handling the scandal.

A member of the German Bundestag

Bundestag

The Bundestag is a federal legislative body in Germany. In practice Germany is governed by a bicameral legislature, of which the Bundestag serves as the lower house and the Bundesrat the upper house. The Bundestag is established by the German Basic Law of 1949, as the successor to the earlier...

 compared the possible impact of the scandal in Germany to the Spiegel scandal

Spiegel scandal

The Spiegel Affair of 1962 was one of the major political scandals in Germany in the era following World War II.The scandal involved a conflict between Franz Josef Strauss, then Federal Minister of Defense, and Rudolf Augstein, owner and editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel magazine, Germany's leading...

 of 1962. On 24 October 2008 the Big Brother Award 2008 in the category Workplace and Communications was awarded to Telekom for the scandal.