martinibuster - 8:25 pm on Jan 13, 2012 (gmt 0)

Google's first official response written by Nelson Mattos of Google, linked to by Matt Cutts here [plus.google.com]. Here is Google's response:

We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites. We’ve already unreservedly apologised to Mocality. We’re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we’ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved.

That response falls short of the CEO of Mocality's request for these three questions to be answered:

Someone, somewhere, has some questions to answer. •If Google wanted to work with our data, why didn’t they just ask? In discussions with various Google Kenya/Africa folks in the past, I’d raised the idea of working together more closely in Kenya. Getting Kenyan businesses online is precisely what we do. •Who authorised this? Until we uncovered the ‘India by way of Mountain View’ angle, I could have believed that this was a local team that somehow forgot the corporate motto, but not now. •Who knew, and who SHOULD have known, even if they didn’t know