Cambridge Analytica Filmed Saying They Interfered In, Nigeria, Argentina, US And More Than 200 Elections Across The World
Senior executives at Cambridge Analytica the data company that credits itself with Donald Trump’s presidential victory have been secretly filmed saying they could entrap politicians in compromising situations with bribes and Ukrainian sex workers.
They have admitted to working on over 200 elections across the world, including Nigeria, Kenya, India, Argentina and Czech Republic.
In an undercover investigation by Channel 4 News, the company’s chief executive Alexander Nix said the British firm secretly campaigns in elections across the world. This includes operating through a web of shadowy front companies, or by using sub-contractors.
In one exchange, when asked about digging up material on political opponents, Mr Nix said they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.
In another he said: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the Internet.”
Offering bribes to public officials is an offence under both the UK Bribery Act and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Cambridge Analytica operates in the UK and is registered in the United States.
The admissions were filmed at a series of meetings at London hotels over four months, between November 2017 and January 2018. An undercover reporter for Channel 4 News posed as a fixer for a wealthy client hoping to get candidates elected in Sri Lanka.
In the meetings, the executives boasted that Cambridge Analytica and its parent company Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) had worked on the elections. The company is at the center of a scandal over its role in the harvesting of more than 50 million Facebook profiles.
