A Rare Criminal Case Against a Telecom Over State Surveillance
On September 15, 2026, Norway's national police units Kripos and PST raided Telenor's headquarters at Fornebu and charged the state-controlled telecom giant in two parallel cases tied to its former Myanmar subsidiary. Kripos is investigating suspected complicity in crimes against humanity; PST is investigating suspected breaches of sanctions law. According to the joint press release, the conduct at issue runs from the February 1, 2021 military coup until the March 25, 2022 completion of Telenor Myanmar's sale — a period in which the subsidiary "repeatedly" handed over customers' historical traffic data to the junta (Kripos/PST press release).
This is not a regulator issuing a fine. It is Norwegian police bringing potential criminal charges against a company for what its foreign subsidiary did under threat from a military regime — one of the first times a telecom operator has faced this kind of exposure for lawful-intercept-style cooperation with an authoritarian government.
What Prosecutors Allege
The sanctions case centers on Telenor's 2022 sale of Telenor Myanmar to Lebanon's M1 Group, which PST says included sanctioned surveillance equipment transferred without Foreign Ministry authorization — a possible breach of Norway's Myanmar sanctions regulation, in force since 2003 and amended repeatedly since (Lovdata, Forskrift om restriktive tiltak mot Myanmar/Burma). The complicity case rests on the data handovers themselves: Telenor Myanmar served more than 18 million customers and held names, addresses, ID numbers, location data and call logs on all of them (Open Society Justice Initiative). A related civil suit in Norway alleges the company disclosed data tied to at least 1,253 phone numbers to military authorities and seeks roughly €9,000 in damages per affected customer.
Telenor disputes wrongdoing but not the underlying facts. Media relations director David Fidjeland told reporters that employees "risked imprisonment, torture or the death penalty if the military authorities' orders were not complied with," and that the company "had no real choice" — while confirming no individuals face charges and that Telenor has cooperated with prosecutors for years (Developing Telecoms).
The Case for Accountability
The strongest argument for prosecuting Telenor is not sentimental. Justice For Myanmar and 45 civil-society organizations warned the company in 2021, before the sale closed, that handing infrastructure and a lawful-interception gateway to a military-linked buyer would put a surveillance apparatus directly into the junta's hands (Access Now). Telenor proceeded anyway. If a Western multinational can operate a mass-surveillance-capable network inside an authoritarian state, extract enormous profit for years, and then walk away — handing the keys to the same military that will use them for arrests and executions — with no legal consequence, the message to every other operator in a fragile democracy is that exit absolves everything. Criminal exposure is one of the few levers that changes a boardroom's calculus before the crisis, not after.
Where the Proportionate Case Diverges
But criminalizing a company's conduct under a functioning legal compulsion regime is a different problem than criminalizing negligence. Myanmar's Telecommunications Law empowered the junta to compel data disclosure, and refusal carried real threat of harm to local staff — Telenor's account of "no real choice" is not obviously false. Treating compelled disclosure the same as voluntary complicity risks a genuinely bad outcome: telecoms conclude the only safe move in any authoritarian market is to leave immediately when repression begins, ceding the network to a domestic, state-linked operator with none of Telenor's transparency reporting, human-rights due diligence, or public accountability. Myanmar is the case study — Shwe Byain Phyu, the junta-linked conglomerate that ended up controlling 80% of the successor operator, was never going to publish a transparency report or face a Norwegian prosecutor.
The sanctions charge is more solid ground than the complicity charge, precisely because it doesn't require weighing coercion — either the surveillance equipment left Norway's jurisdiction without Foreign Ministry sign-off, as the sanctions regulation requires, or it didn't. That is a bright-line compliance failure, not a judgment call made under duress.
What Should Follow
The proportionate response is not to let the complicity theory collapse into strict liability for any company operating where a coup can happen, but to fix the actual gap this case exposes: there is no binding requirement, in Norway or anywhere else, that a telecom conduct a human-rights-exit review — auditing what surveillance infrastructure and data access it hands to a successor — before selling out of a repressive market. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights already imply this obligation exists throughout a company's presence, including its departure; what's missing is a hard sanctions-style checkpoint at the point of sale, not a criminal complicity standard applied retroactively to conduct extracted under threat. Norway's prosecutors should win the sanctions case on the equipment transfer. The complicity case will be the harder, more consequential precedent — and getting it wrong in either direction, by excusing coerced disclosure entirely or by treating it as equivalent to voluntary collaboration, will shape how every telecom operating in a fragile democracy behaves the next time a coup happens.