The Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion Ser­vices of T&T (TSTT) has promised swift in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to al­le­ga­tions that con­fi­den­tial tele­phone records of a T&T Guardian re­porter have been leaked. The com­pa­ny gave the as­sur­ance in a state­ment yes­ter­day.

In the state­ment, TSTT said: "TSTT notes the ac­cu­sa­tion pub­lished in the Sun­day Guardian head­line and ar­ti­cle dat­ed Oc­to­ber 14, 2012, and we have al­ready sig­nalled our in­ten­tion to in­ves­ti­gate this mat­ter thor­ough­ly to en­sure that our pro­ce­dures were not breached nor our name un­fair­ly tar­nished."

The state­ment al­so said TSTT had all the nec­es­sary tech­nol­o­gy "to as­cer­tain the ve­rac­i­ty of this ac­cu­sa­tion and will, if nec­es­sary, as it has in the past, take the swift ac­tion re­quired to en­force penal­ties on any­one found to be in breach of the law and or per­sons or com­pa­nies seek­ing to dam­age its good name.

"TSTT wish­es to re­in­force that it treats any re­quest re­gard­ing the dis­sem­i­na­tion of cus­tomers' call de­tail records to any­one as a se­ri­ous mat­ter," it said. "The is­su­ing of cus­tomer call de­tail records by any em­ploy­ee of TSTT to any­one out­side of es­tab­lished law­ful pro­ce­dures re­sults in the strongest dis­ci­pli­nary ac­tion, in­clud­ing dis­missal or ex­ter­nal le­gal ac­tion."

The re­lease said these pro­ce­dures and the as­so­ci­at­ed penal­ties had been clear­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed to all TSTT's per­son­nel at every lev­el of the com­pa­ny. "We up­hold our oblig­a­tion to com­ply with the law as stat­ed in the In­ter­cep­tion of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Act 2010," it said.

"Cus­tomer de­tail records are on­ly pro­vid­ed to an au­tho­rised of­fi­cer by means of the is­sue of a no­tice in writ­ing. "Such a no­tice in writ­ing must be pre­ced­ed by a war­rant is­sued un­der the act, which au­tho­ris­es the dis­clo­sure. "It must al­so be not­ed that a cus­tomer who is the reg­is­tered own­er of an ac­count can re­quest and re­ceive out­go­ing de­tail records for that spe­cif­ic ac­count as it is his or her in­for­ma­tion."

TSTT said it re­mained ded­i­cat­ed to pro­tect­ing cus­tomers' in­for­ma­tion and pri­va­cy.