April 15, 2023

WORLD: A Surrogacy Empire Owned By A Convicted Pedophile Under Investigation For Arranging Fictitious Marriages, Falsifying Documents To Smuggle Babies Out Of Ukraine, Trading Children For Profit.

Reduxx, Feminists News and Opinion
written by Genevieve Gluck
Monday April 10, 2023

A surrogacy empire owned by a convicted pedophile has come under investigation for arranging fictitious marriages, falsifying documents to smuggle babies out of Ukraine, and trading children for profit, according to a Paris-based consortium of investigators.

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) has released an investigation which links Barcelona-based surrogacy company Subrogalia to a network of corporations controlled by two men, one of whom sexually abused the other as a child and has an extensive history of child rape.

José María Hill Prados, now 62, was 45 years old when he first met Didac Giménez Sánchez at the Casal Dels Infants del Raval center for minors in Barcelona. Prados exposed 12-year-old Sánchez to pornographic films in order to groom him at his home in Cervelló, Spain, where he also sexually assaulted the boy.

In 2007, Prados was sentenced to eight years in prison for sexually abusing both Sánchez and his sister on charges that included raping the children, and for creating illicit pornography of the acts he subjected them to.

However, the sentence was anonymized, with Prados’ identity being obscured as ‘Carlos Jesús’ in court records and Sánchez being identified as ‘Baltasar.’ The following year, Sánchez desperately recanted his allegations, claiming he was pressured into making the accusations. But the judge disagreed, having already heard the boy’s testimony presented to the court, and found there was sufficient evidence to sustain the conviction. Prados would go on to serve his full prison sentence.

This was not the first instance of child sexual abuse committed by Prados. In 1996, he was investigated by a Barcelona court for the alleged crime of corruption of minors and several more sexual assaults of which his four adopted children, aged between 12 and 17, were reported to be victims. Prados, then 36, was the founder of a Russian children’s foster organization called Padres para Siempre (Parents forever), and the details of the case were sealed from the public.

Defense lawyer Jordi Rojo used Prados’ children, those he abused, to argue against his imprisonment, and told the court that his client “loves his children very much and is very concerned about what could happen to them now.” The four minors, two brothers aged 17 and 16 and another two boys aged 13 and 12, had been taken into the care of the Generalitat’s Children’s Department during the court proceedings.

On the day the children were expected to testify in court regarding the allegations, they suddenly backed down and denied that they had ever been sexually abused. As the children had not yet made a statement on the record, Prados could not be convicted.

Soon after Prados was released from prison for his 2007 conviction, he legally changed his name to Diego, and he and his former victim became business partners.

In 2015, Prados and Sánchez set up a surrogacy company called Subrogalia based in Spain, according to corporate records. The company, one of over a dozen currently owned by the two men, was quickly mired in controversy and allegations of child trafficking.

The probe into Prados’ extensive criminal empire found that Subrogalia had been investigated in at least two countries out of the nine where it now operates. Alleged crimes include selling and trafficking of babies, in addition to providing clients with infants that were not biologically related to them.

In 2016, the year after the Spanish franchise of Subrogalia was founded, two gay couples sued the company for failing to deliver them sons as promised. A judge ordered the company to pay €88,000 (approx. $95,000 USD) to the claimants for “serious and grave” breaches of contract.

Subrogalia has operations in as many as nine countries, including Russia, Greece, and, briefly, Mexico. But the primary source of the company’s revenue can be traced to its clinics in Ukraine. The OCCRP investigation cites a former manager who said that, before the war, women in Ukraine bore approximately 100 babies annually for paying parents, each earning the company around €8,000 (approx. $8,600 USD) in profit.

“Dídac [Sánchez] and José María [Prados] share an office. Prados calls himself Diego in the company, perhaps because it is the only name that appears in the Mercantile Registry. They arrive early, go to eat together and leave around eight in the evening. It is difficult to see them separated, they are like the same person”, a former Subrogalia employee told El Confidencial.

“The entire office knows the reality of the company: they know that Diego is not Diego, but José María, the Raval pedophile, and that Dídac is Diego, his victim, who only counts outside the gates. He is the pretty face of Hill Prados for the press, because he knows that his children are too contaminated to come to light,” the source continued, adding that there is frequently an “unjustified presence of minors” at the company.

Whistleblowers at Subrogalia have told the press that Sánchez serves as the face of the company, despite being regarded as a “nobody at a business level.” Prados, it is said, is the “shadow boss” of the scheme. Prados’ adopted sons also similarly assist in business operations. Alan Hill Prados has worked as a surrogacy manager at Subrogalia, and Andrei, who is originally from Russia, acts as an intermediary in dealings between the clinic in his home country and the Barcelona location.

Before the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, the Eastern European nation earned a reputation as an international hub for the sale of babies through surrogacy contracts. The industry has been known to target women who are struggling financially, offering them payments of approximately $11,000 for a healthy baby – more than three times the average yearly salary in Ukraine.

In order to distance the company from the litigation, Subrogalia Ukraine rebranded as Eurosurrogacy in 2017. Concurrently, Subrogalia Spain was renamed to Gestlife.

“More than 45% of our parents are single men, gay couples, or single gay men, who, at a certain point in their lives, have received the call of parenthood. Surrogacy for gay couples, or for single men, is the best way to achieve parenthood, due to the practical impossibility of a successful international adoption process. The number of surrogacy cases in Spain has, in the last two years, surpassed the number of international adoptions,” reads Gestlife’s website on a page aimed at “LGBT” customers.

Sánchez was also named as the founder of his own Ukrainian IVF clinic in 2017 named InterFiv. In 2021, one of Prados’ sons took over ownership, and that same year the clinic was raided by law enforcement for allegedly arranging fictitious marriages and falsifying documents in order to smuggle babies out of the country.

Prados and Sánchez were also business partners with one of the largest IVF clinic chains in the world, the BioTexCom Clinic in Kiev, which has implanted embryos for about 95 percent of Eurosurrogacy’s Spanish clients.

In 2018, Sergii Antonov, a Kiev-based lawyer specializing in the medical field, told the press that of the estimated 2,000 infants born through surrogacy in Ukraine every year, nearly half were through BioTexCom.

That same year, Ukrainian authorities opened an investigation into the company. Employees were accused of being involved in a “criminal group” that used surrogacy programs as a cover for trafficking children. Prosecutors allege they helped “foreign citizens to make illegal deals, involving minors” that amounted to “trading children for a financial reward.”

Eurosurrogacy was implicated in the crimes and has had its bank accounts frozen as the probe into their illegal activities continues.

“It is absolutely appalling that a convicted sex offender should be allowed to operate in such a sensitive area as gestational surrogacy, which is based on exploitation of women living in poverty,” Nina Potarska, Ukrainian head of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, told the OCCRP. “Given the background of such exploitation, it is not surprising that there are allegations of malpractice, such as trafficking of babies.”

BioTexCom told the press that its management was unaware of Prados’ criminal record when they went into business together. This claim is not entirely without merit: in addition to his surrogacy network, Prados is also the figure behind a shadowy corporation dedicated to burying and erasing incriminating information from the internet.

“We erase your past,” boasts Eliminalia, a business led by the convicted pedophile, which has netted millions in revenue over the past decade for restoring the online reputation of hundreds of clients who have been convicted and investigated in 54 countries for corruption, money laundering, sexual abuse and drug trafficking.

Last month, over one hundred investigators with the OCCRP analyzed more than 50,000 leaked internal documents related to Eliminalia’s fraudulent business model, including contracts, identification, content requested to be deleted and fees paid by nearly 1,500 users. They found shocking connections to government corruption in Latin America. Among Prados’ clients: the former governor of the Mexican state of Veracruz, Javier Duarte; relatives of Venezuelan Chavista leaders; and doctors linked to Chile’s DINA, the repressive arm of the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Other customers who requested the removal of their background have been accused of laundering money for the Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas.

Altogether, Prados profited from service fees paid by white-collar criminals and businessmen, but also drug traffickers, child abusers, and crooked politicians. One contract from 2018, the highest single-paying client, amounted to $427,584.

Eliminalia utilizes a network of 600 websites to manipulate search engine algorithms so that falsified articles will appear most prominently while the clients’ undesired information becomes buried. Prados’ Florida company Maidan Holding produces positive results through sites designed to appear authentic. Le Monde France, London New Times, and CNNEWS Today are some of the cover outlets that have hosted news articles about the company’s customers.

Currently Eliminalia is said to operate in a dozen countries, with Italy, Switzerland, Turkey and the US among them. While it was originally based in Kiev, the Russian invasion forced the company to relocate, and EL PAÍS reports that its new location can be found in Georgia. Like the rebranding undertaken by Prados’ surrogacy clinics, Eliminalia is now recorded as Idata Protection S. L., according to business register records.

Police have stated that investigations into the child trafficking activities led by Prados and Sánchez are still underway, but a source within Ukraine’s security service believes they have evidence to support the charges. A case is expected to be brought against InterFiv once Ukraine’s legal system is once again fully operational, though it is unclear at this time when that may be possible.

While the investigation continues into Prados and Sánchez, months ago a representative of Subrogalia in Russia was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for human trafficking after he was found to have sold a child abandoned by a Spanish couple to another client.
ForbiddenStories.org
written by Phineas Rueckert, Shawn Boburg (Washington Post), Kira Zalan (OCCRP), Lilia Saul Rodriguez (OCCRP), David Pegg (The Guardian), Lorenzo Bagnoli (IRPI) and Joaquin Gil (El País) contributed interviews and research
Friday February 17, 2023

In August 2018, Daniel Sánchez, a Mexican investigative journalist, began receiving peculiar calls and texts about a recent article he’d published. The messages, which according to Sánchez, came weekly, were from individuals claiming to be lawyers who asked him to take down his article.

Sánchez is a journalist at Página 66, a small investigative news outlet in Mexico’s southern Campeche state. In January 2018, Sánchez published an investigation into the bad track record of a video surveillance company, Interconecta, that the state’s governor had contracted. Sifting through financial audit records, Sánchez discovered that the company, a subsidiary of the tech multinational Grupo Altavista, had been linked to cases of corruption and tax fraud.

About two years after Sánchez’s article was published, he received an even stranger request. Sent by a supposed local marketing expert calling himself Humberto Herrera Rincón Gallardo, the email claimed Sánchez’s article infringed upon a European data law called GDPR and asked him to remove references to Grupo Altavista and its founder Ricardo Orrantia. The email was signed by the “Compliance Department” of the European Union.

Sánchez, perplexed, consulted Artículo 19, a press freedom organization, that advised him not to remove the piece.

But a month later, Gallardo was back. This time, he tried a new strategy: a copyright infringement claim. In January 2020, Gallardo filed a claim with Digital Ocean, Pagina 66’s US-based hosting provider, alleging that Sánchez had copied his content illegally. As proof, Gallardo linked to a third-party site that had published a replica of Sánchez’s piece, but with a falsified earlier publish date and fake author: Humberto Herrera Rincón Gallardo.

This time, the strategy worked. Digital Ocean ordered Sánchez to remove his article from Página 66’s site, or it would go black. He appealed to Digital Ocean but was unsuccessful. Finally, fearing he would lose his readership, and his livelihood as a journalist, he capitulated and removed the piece. (Digital Ocean did not respond to requests for comment.)

In Mexico, one of the most dangerous countries for journalists, copyright claims didn’t seem as drastic as the threats Sánchez’s colleagues had endured – but the result was the same, he said. “It means there is a form of subtle censorship,” Sánchez said in an interview with Forbidden Stories.

But this campaign, it turns out, wasn’t the work of local lawyers or marketing experts. According to documents obtained by Forbidden Stories, Grupo Altavista hired Eliminalia—a Spanish reputation management company that offers private clients content-deletion services—to remove dozens of articles, including Sánchez’s, linked to the company and founder’s name.

Gallardo, the marketing expert whose name appears on the complaint, denied having ever been “an employee of Eliminalia or of any company related to Eliminalia.” He told Forbidden Stories, “the use of my name in the case brought against the Página66 portal was completely improper and without my knowledge or consent,” he said.

Sánchez was one of the hundreds of journalists, bloggers and newsrooms worldwide whose work was deleted, modified or hidden from the internet between 2015 and 2021 by Eliminalia, Forbidden Stories and its partners found.

Eliminalia claims its services remove “unwanted and erroneous information” for clients with a “right to be forgotten,” but nearly 50,000 internal company documents leaked to Forbidden Stories contradict this narrative. The files show how Eliminalia worked for scammers, spyware companies, torturers, convicted criminals, corrupt politicians and others in the global underworld to hide public-interest information. Previous reporting, including by Rest of World, identified some of Eliminalia’s clients – but this leak, which includes confidential emails, client names, contracts and other legal documents – gives a fuller understanding of the opaque company’s operations.

Eliminalia declined our requests for comment. In a letter to Forbidden Stories, a French law firm representing Eliminalia wrote that a one-week deadline to respond to our questions was “far too short for a real respect of the adversarial process,” and that most “questions demonstrate a partial and dishonorable approach,” and “concern business secrecy.” (Forbidden Stories extended the deadline by one week but did not hear back from the company.)

For six months, Forbidden Stories scrutinized the documents as part of the “Story Killers” project, a global investigation into disinformation mercenaries that stems from the work of assassinated Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh and involves 100 journalists from 30 media organizations. Through dozens of interviews with former employees, clients, data-protection experts and victims, Forbidden Stories and its partners investigated how this company manipulates online service providers, weaponizes copyright law to remove content, and in some cases, threatens and abuses journalists, with one aim: burying the truth.

Forbidden Stories identified Eliminalia clients in 50 countries across five continents. The leak of around 1,500 current and former clients includes details of Eliminalia’s business dealings with a medical doctor who reportedly operated a torture center during Chile’s dictatorship and was found guilty of homicide; former bank officials at Banca Privada d’Andorra, accused of money laundering for corrupt Venezuelan officials; and a Brazilian businessman implicated in a global prostitution network, among others.

Forbidden Stories also investigated the sprawling business empire linked to Eliminalia’s founder Diego “Dídac” Sánchez. Spanish business records show that in 2020 and 2021, Eliminalia reported sales worth roughly €2.7 million. But our consortium found that Sánchez and his business partner José María Hill Prados also run at least 50 companies globally, including a surrogacy company facing litigation for child trafficking.

A lucrative market

Back in Mexico, these documents show that in April 2019, Orrantia hired Eliminalia to request content removal in compliance with “current personal data protection legislation.” In total, Orrantia requested the removal of 13 news articles from Mexican outlets, including Sánchez’s, and three Google search result terms related to his and his wife’s names and Grupo Altavista. He paid more than €12,000 in four installments to Eliminalia. (Orrantia did not respond to requests for comment.)

Orrantia was one of over 150 Mexican clients in the leaked documents. Others include Pedro Miguel Haces Barba, a union leader who in 2019 was exposed for inking lucrative contracts with two governors later arrested for corruption, and Miguel Angel Colorado Cessa, brother of a Zetas Cartel drug trafficker. (Through a spokesperson, Haces Barba declined to comment. Colorado Cessa did not respond to requests for comment.)

Eliminalia’s clients paid handsomely to have their digital pasts removed. Haces Barba paid €110,000, requesting roughly 300 articles be removed from the internet. AMR Bauxite, a French “responsible” mining company accused of tax evasion in 2020, paid €155,000. Adar Capital Partners, a company founded by Zev Marynberg, an Israeli-Argentine banker accused of laundering money for Hugo Chávez’s regime, hired an Eliminalia partner, paying nearly €400,000. (AMR Bauxite and Adar Capital Partners did not respond to requests for comment.)

Under Sánchez and Hill Prados, Eliminalia, sought to establish itself in new markets. According to the company’s website, it has offices in more than a dozen countries, including Italy, Switzerland, Turkey and the US. In Latin America, Eliminalia has current or former offices in the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Ecuador and Mexico.

Forbidden Stories identified multiple clients linked to organized crime, including Malchas Tetruashvili, who was convicted of laundering money on behalf of a member of the Russian mob, and José Mestré, a well-known Spanish businessman-turned-cocaine-trafficker. (Tetruashvili and Mestré did not respond to requests for comment.)

“The legitimate uses for this kind of reputation management are few compared to the advantages for corrupt individuals,” Emma Briant, a research fellow at Bard College who studies information warfare, told Forbidden Stories. “There’s a lot of companies that specialize in that kind of thing. And I think it’s really damaging because very often it’s very difficult for people to actually locate reliable information because it’s just not visible anymore,” Briant said.

“Chilling effect”

In November 2020, Tord Lundström, the technical director of Qurium, a Sweden-based nonprofit organization that provides security services, including web-hosting services for dozens of independent media outlets, opened an e-mail from a lawyer named Raul Soto. Soto claimed to represent the “European Union Commission.”

Lundström – a tech geek with a background in corporate data protection – found the email unusual and began inquiring. Conducting an internal investigation, Lundström traced the email to Eliminalia and mapped the company’s digital infrastructure. Soto, he found, was not a real person, but rather a pseudonym used by an Eliminalia employee based in Ukraine. “For us, this was like, ‘Oh my God, this is a new power game because we cannot do anything about it,” he said, referring to the slippery tactics employed by this firm and others.

Lundström began to see a pattern emerge. At first, Eliminalia sent takedown requests to individual journalists. When journalists started pushing back, they went after hosting providers. If this didn’t work, they’d move to “deindexing,” a “black hat” marketing strategy aimed at fooling Google into hiding search terms from web results.

Data protection laws, Eliminalia and other firms realized, could be weaponized to remove content from the internet. Two laws – the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and GDPR – were easily exploitable.

Passed in 1998, the DMCA revised US federal copyright law. A byproduct of the internet’s early days, its original intent was to facilitate the removal of copyrighted content that started appearing on torrent sites like The Pirate Bay and LimeWire in the years after, Adam Holland, Project Manager at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, explained. The DMCA made it easier for companies like Disney to get copyright-infringing content taken down, Holland, speaking from a personal capacity, said. They simply sent a copyright claim to the infringing website and requested it be deleted. If the offending site didn’t remove the content, the company, as the rightful owner, could sue the website and the hosting provider of that website.

Reputation laundering firms like Eliminalia soon realized that this law could be advantageous. Their strategy was simple: copy an article, publish it on a third-party website – a blog or fake website – with a falsified earlier date than the original, and claim the original article infringed DMCA–like in Sánchez’s case. “It’s much easier than going to court. It’s much easier than finding some [journalist] and hitting them with a wrench. We’ll just send a copyright notice,” Holland said.

In 2002, researchers, who worried that the DMCA as written could be used to chill free speech, created a repository of DMCA takedowns, now the Lumen database. Lumen, which Holland runs, has amassed over 25 million takedown requests. They receive upwards of 7,000 per day, thanks to agreements with hosting providers.

Holland said the number of requests increased “rapidly and steadily” around 2012 for several reasons, including automation technologies that allowed for the mass filing of DMCA complaints. “I guarantee you that when they wrote the DMCA, they did not envision that there would be huge networks of eastern European bot armies creating fake newspaper websites to take down criticism,” he said.

According to Shreya Tewari, a research fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center who works on the Lumen project, fraudulent DMCAs are not always successful but are often used in combination with other threats to scare journalists into removing content. In one big-data study, she found that over 300 articles had been illegitimately removed from the internet using this tactic, which illustrates a “chilling effect.”

DMCA takedown requests were just one tool in a larger arsenal of tactics, Forbidden Stories found. Many leaked documents include takedown requests invoking the GDPR. Eliminalia also attempted to hide information they couldn’t get deleted, like through deindexing.

“We actively fight fraudulent takedown attempts by using a combination of automated and human review to detect signals of abuse,” a Google spokesperson said, adding: “We provide extensive transparency about these removals to hold requesters accountable, and sites can file counter notifications for us to re-review if they believe content has been removed from our results in error.”

Typically, but not always, these DMCA and legal claims were sent by fake names, such as Raul Soto, and email addresses spoofing European or other legal institutions. (In a statement, a European Commission official said that “CERT-EU and the Commission are not aware of other domain names impersonating EU institutions and related to this particular case,” adding: “The existence of the domain name is not a violation, its use for false impersonation is.”)

New identities

In July 2022, the online message board for the Black Student Union at Quinsigamond Community College (QCC), in Massachusetts, started getting inundated with spam. Someone had posted a link with a brand logo on the forum’s open thread, and a guest account began replying erratically. Within hours, the account had posted 7,000 comments.

These comments hid a digital atomic bomb. In each comment were hundreds of links known as “open redirects.” These links appear, at first sight, to drive traffic to legitimate websites, such as Stanford University or NASA. However, they are designed to instantly travel from these real sites to illegitimate sites, taking advantage of a flaw in website infrastructure.

It turns out, the thousands of comments in the Black Student Union forum were redirected to a network of fake websites created to launder the reputation of Eliminalia clients, Forbidden Stories found. In total, the guest account posted more than 2 million links. To Google’s algorithm, it would have appeared that the linked websites had suddenly received a spike in traffic. The algorithm, in turn, may have boosted them to the top of search results, which appears to have effectively hidden real results by pushing them lower in the rankings. (A Google spokesperson contended that generating backlinks did not guarantee improvement in search ranking.)

In October, QCC discovered and removed the rogue account and deleted the link from the message board, while also beefing up IT security. “It is incredibly disheartening that these online ‘fake actors’ can use reputable academic institutions such as QCC to help propagate misinformation. This goes against the essence of higher education, which values open dialogue, honesty, truth, and knowledge,” QCC President Luis G. Pedraja said in a statement.

This strategy, at least for a time, worked. Suddenly, a search for Victor Bayona Viedma featured articles about his new poetry collection before accusations that he and another cop had allegedly tortured a detainee in Spain. The name Gabriel Hernan Westmann highlighted stories about a chihuahua expert, not a pilot accused of working with drug cartels. (All charges were later dropped). According to several highly-placed Google results, Andrea Formenti of the company Area S.P.A, invented a flip phone, not that this Italian company sold surveillance equipment to the Libyan government.

(Viedma did not respond to requests for comment. Westmann told a member of the consortium that he hired Eliminalia to remove “a false complaint that was filed against me for political reasons.” In a statement, Area S.P.A. confirmed that it had hired Eliminalia for content deletion services, saying: “One of the main reasons for our willingness to remove online content concerning our activities is precisely their lack of complete truthfulness and accuracy.”)

“If all you have to do is learn how to game Google and you can fix all of your reputation problems, that’s going to be a problem,” Katharine Trendacosta, associate director of policy and activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said.

Qurium’s research identified 622 websites that Eliminalia appeared to use to launder the reputation of its clients, which it shared exclusively with the consortium. These websites, with names like CNN News Today, London Uncensored, Mayday Washington and Taiwan Times, were set up by an offshore company called Communication Media Group. Qurium was able to link this company to Maidan Holdings, the Miami-based holding company that owns Eliminalia. (The websites share IP infrastructure and other technical elements, such as copyright pages, suggesting they were set up by the same individual or group.)

Analyzing the content of these websites, Qurium identified 3,350 articles naming Eliminalia clients, typically portraying them positively. To make the websites appear authentic, Eliminalia also posted content copyrighted by legitimate media outlets. “It’s a bit despairing,” said Léna Corot, a former journalist at the French tech website Usine Digital, whose article was copied and published on one of these fake sites – lemonde-france.fr.

Qurium’s technical research aligns with the consortium’s reporting, which found that Eliminalia proposed fake article placement to clients.

In a 2019 email obtained by Forbidden Stories and its partners, an Eliminalia employee told a client that the firm planned to publish “neutral or positive” articles about an imagined persona —portrayed as distinguished in his profession— who had the same name as the client. The employee wrote that he expected the proposed articles would end up in the top search results for the client’s name.

“This is a nice new definition of censorship,” Lundström said.

Going global

In his 2016 autobiography, “Secret of Success,” Eliminalia founder Dídac Sánchez recounts his mantra: “Think big and you will be big.”

In the years since he founded Eliminalia in 2013, Sánchez followed his own advice, establishing a web-like, global network of companies. Reviewing financial filings, Forbidden Stories and its partners identified roughly more than 50 companies across 9 jurisdictions connected to Sánchez and the family of his business partner Hill Prados. Most of these companies are registered under Maidan Holdings. Several Maidan companies, including World Intelligence Ltd and World Reputation, also offered political-consulting services, according to past reporting and archived web pages.

In an undercover operation, Colombian journalists at La FM – who are not a part of this project – found that Eliminalia was offering to run political campaigns in Colombia, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic through one of their subsidiaries. Several sources alleged to Forbidden Stories and its partners that Eliminalia had also engaged in hacking, but these claims could not be verified.

Not all of Sánchez and Hill Prados’s companies operated in the reputation management space. Subrogalia Ukraine and PP Interfiv Ltd., two surrogacy companies owned by Sánchez and Hill Prados, were investigated by authorities in Ukraine for child trafficking, Forbidden Stories found.

Experts who spoke with Forbidden Stories said that while Eliminalia is not the only firm in the reputation management industry, it is perhaps one of the most established. “They’re clearly an old and sophisticated player in the space. They’ve been doing this for some time,” Holland, at Lumen, said.

But as Eliminalia has grown, so too has the market for reputation management. “You have a whole series of professional service industries, such as public relations agents, lobbyists, lawyers…who basically help in this rebranding of unsavory individuals and companies and governments, into internationally respected businesspeople and philanthropic cosmopolitans,” Tena Prelec, a researcher at Oxford University who studies reputation laundering, said.

For many journalists and press freedom advocates who spoke with Forbidden Stories, holding these actors accountable often felt like a Sisyphean task.

In the days after his article was taken down, Sánchez, at Página 66, investigated legal avenues to restore his content. He contacted Artículo 19 and Media Defence, a press freedom organization based in the UK. Reversing a fraudulent DMCA is not easy, though. You first need to file a “counter-notice.” These claims can lead to protracted legal battles, which can be expensive and time-consuming. Sánchez would need to appear in a court in Arizona, a cost that neither he nor the organizations could afford. “If we had the legal support, we would go ahead,” Sánchez said. “That’s what we want: for the information to stay on the page.”

Even if he won the case and got the article back up, the only recompense for his lost time under the DMCA claim would be his legal fees.

A final disappearing act

Since Forbidden Stories reached out to Eliminalia for comment a few weeks ago, it seems to have deleted its own internet trail. In January, the same fake news sites Forbidden Stories and Qurium linked to Maidan Holdings–perhaps created to polish the reputation of Eliminalia’s clients–had been modified. Scouring the rebranded websites, though, we found a link: one of the new copyright pages was tied to Maria Ladovchyna, Eliminalia’s technical manager. While this trace is insufficient to tie the entire network of fake sites to Eliminalia, it suggests the company may have played a role in their set-up.

Then, roughly a month before our publication, Eliminalia appears to have committed its final act–it, too, changed identities. Today, the door of the Barcelona coworking office that once hosted Eliminalia now reads “Idata Protection.” Company filings reviewed by Forbidden Stories confirm the rebrand, possibly resulting from investigations by journalists and researchers that generated negative press. But when two members of the consortium visited the office, an employee said, “the company is called Idata Protection, but we belong to Eliminalia.” Sánchez, the founder, was no longer in Barcelona, according to the employee.

The rebrand is consistent with the company’s history. Eliminalia is an expert in “creating problems and then solving them,” a source with knowledge of the company told the consortium.

Posted by Princess Mononoke at 2:32 PM

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)