A Spanish company cleans up the image of corrupt people

A Spanish company cleans up the image of corrupt people, criminals and drug dealers from 54 countries on the Internet

Catalan company Eliminalia has made millions of euros over the past decade cleaning up the internet reputation of hundreds of people convicted and investigated in 54 countries for corruption, money laundering, sex abuse and drug trafficking. This has been confirmed by an investigation by the journalist organization Forbidden Stories, in which EL PAÍS participates with more than twenty media outlets such as The Washington Post, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and Haaretz, which exposes the disinformation tricks of this company to destroy digital content. Using fake websites or fraudulently using intellectual property laws are their main weapons.

A hundred reporters analyzed a leak of 50,000 documents, including contracts, passports, content to be deleted and fees paid by nearly 1,500 users. The initiative is part of the Storykillers project, which is taking down the disinformation industry.

With 774 customers, Spain is Eliminalia’s main market, followed by Italy (300 users), Mexico (159), Great Britain (126) and Colombia (73). The Spanish list of people who have knocked on the door of this company ranges from Adrián de la Joya, a businessman linked to former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, to former member of the General Council of Justice (CGPJ) Ramón Camp i Batala. There are also fewer public figures, such as a police officer convicted of violence or a priest arrested for looting widows.

Eliminalia has also turned its radar to Latin America. Former governors plagued by corruption, such as Mexican PRI member Javier Duarte from Veracruz, or doctors with dark pasts with ties to DINA (National Intelligence Directorate), the repressive arm of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet’s (1973-1990) dictatorship, such as Hernán Horacio Taricco Lavin, are on the list of international clients. There is also an Italian company fined for selling spy systems to the Syrian regime (Area Spa), or a Swiss bank that managed the assets of alleged Venezuelan money launderers (CBH Compagnie Bancaire Helvétique). Two investigative journalism portals, Maka Angola and The Elephant, also landed in the peephole of this company, which uses the slogan “We erage your past”.

The rates that politicians, drug dealers, sex offenders, white-collar criminals and businessmen pay to annihilate their digital past range from €500 for a website – according to a 2018 contract – to €400,000, depending on the items to be neutralized and its complexity.

To achieve its purpose, the company resorts to various disinformation tactics. One sends out petitions to search engines and web hosting companies denouncing bogus copyright infringement. Between 2015 and 2021, Eliminalia sent out thousands of these fraudulent requests claiming that they concerned information that had already been made public. And he resorted to shell companies to cover his tracks.

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Fool the algorithm

Another plan to vaporize unwanted content is to trick the algorithms of search engines like Google into better positioning ad hoc messages created by Eliminalia on fake websites. These are articles that emphasize the supposed customer benefit and bury the information that is marginalized on the Internet.

To do this, Eliminalia uses a network of 600 websites it controls through its Florida company Maidan Holding, according to technical analyst Tord Lundstrom. Dozens of fake websites such as Le Monde France, London New Times and CNNEWS Today have published articles about the company’s customers.

Eliminalia was founded in 2013 by Diego (Dídac) Sánchez Jiménez, a thirty-something who presents himself as a “self-made” entrepreneur and is the author of the book “El secreto del éxito”. Eliminalia has expanded its network to 12 countries. Italy, Switzerland, Turkey and the US form an organizational chart that has one of its headquarters in Tbilisi, Georgia, where the company moved its headquarters from Kiev in February 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Eliminalia’s strategist alongside Sánchez is José María Hill Prados, 62. The businessman, founder of the Russian children’s charity Padres para Siempre, is also the head of international expansion. The Spanish secret services explain the choice of Ukraine as the epicenter of Eliminalia’s operations until last year with a fundamental reason: “It is a country where there are practically no money laundering controls,” they emphasize.

Through corporate threads, the Eliminalia founder controls several companies with his partner Hill Prados, who was sentenced to eight years in prison by the Barcelona court in 2005 for abusing a minor.

Sánchez and Hill Prados have declined to answer questions from this newspaper. The Paris law firm Montmartre, represented by lawyers David and Pascal Winter, has responded that “most of the questions addressed to Eliminalia concern professional secrecy or a request for information about clients to which they are unable to respond”.

With a declared income in 2021 of 791,110 euros compared to 1.7 million in the previous year, the company with which the company operates in Spain (Eliminalia 2013 SL) changed its name on January 20th. Just as this journalistic research was about to reach its final sprint. According to the commercial register, the new name is Idata Protection SL.

A sign on the floor of a charming commercial building on Avenida Portal de l’Àngel, Barcelona’s commercial street, announced this change. “The company is called Idata Protection, but we belong to Eliminalia,” explains one of the three employees of the small office to EL PAÍS. Another employee confirms by phone that the company is now committed to data protection and that Sánchez is not in Barcelona.

These are some of Eliminalia’s main customers in Spain. Their records include the fees they paid and the content they wanted erased from cyberspace.

Adrian de la Joya

Businessman associated with retired Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo and implicated in corruption scandals such as the Belt Case, El Pequeño Nicolás or the Lezo Conspiracy. He was arrested while investigating the ex-cop’s adventures. He has a close relationship with the Lebanese arms dealer Abderramán El Assir: both are married to the Fernández Longoria sisters, daughters of a former Spanish ambassador to Egypt. De la Joya, who was being investigated in the Villarejo case, hired Eliminalia in December 2016. He paid 16,000 euros to make 13 news outlets like publico.es or vozpopuli.com disappear. The articles condemned his relationship with Villarejo and former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas, as well as his connections with builder Francisco Hernando, better known as Paco, El Pocero. De la Joya has declined to answer questions from this newspaper.

Jose Mestre Fernandez

Catalan businessman, 64 years old, former general manager of Terminal Cataluña (Tercat), a company that managed a cargo terminal in the port of Barcelona. As a friend of the emeritus king, he is considered one of the richest men in Catalonia. In 2010 he was awarded the best entrepreneur of the year in the logistics industry. And five years later, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison for facilitating the importation of 186 kilos of cocaine on the MSC Corinna, a Panamanian-flagged ship that docked in the Catalan capital in June 2010. Mestre is on the list of 12 businessmen who Corinna Larsen, Juan Carlos I’s ex-partner, is investigating on behalf of a Swiss detective as alleged front men for the former head of state. The businessman paid Eliminalia 30,249 euros between 2016 and 2020 to deindex more than 200 news articles published in EL PAÍS, El Mundo, La Vanguardia, La Razón and El Confidencial by Google about his conviction, being present at the Falciani List and a robbery at his home in Barcelona. This newspaper has tried unsuccessfully to collect Mestre’s version.

Ramon Camp in Batalla

Camp i Batalla, former deputy and senator of the CiU and former member of the General Council of the Judiciary, who practices as a lawyer at the law firm Roca Junyent, paid 7,380 euros to get messages like “The TSJC is investigating whether Ramón Camp has made evasions in some oppositions” from emporda.info or “A report from the public prosecutor’s office links Puigdemont to a businessman in the 3% plan” from the RTVE website. The former deputy assures that his work at Eliminalia is “perfectly legitimate and protected by the right to be forgotten”. And that he hired the law firm to obtain information about a lawsuit filed in 2008. “For ten years I had to see and endure references to this lawsuit on the networks without a mention of his file,” he says.

Juan Hormaechea

He was mayor of Santander in two legislative periods (1987-1990 and 1991-1995). The former leader, who died in 2020 at the age of 81, sought the services of this company in 2017. He requested the deindexing of six messages from EL PAÍS and Periodista Digital, as well as a Wikipedia profile. He paid 4,416 euros. Hormaechea left politics after resigning from office and being sentenced to six years in prison and 14 years from his profession for embezzlement and subterfuge. He escaped jail thanks to a pardon.

Ramón and Higini Cierco

Top shareholders of the defunct Banca Privada de Andorra (BPA), an entity that intervened in March 2015 over alleged money laundering from criminal groups, paid Eliminalia at least €225,489 between 2016 and 2020 to bury hundreds on the news network of the financial institution’s demise, the funds hidden in the BPA by the family of former Catalan President Jordi Pujol, or the alleged connection with former Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo. The information to be destroyed was published in media outlets such as El Confidencial, La Vanguardia and Crónica Global. The Ciercos used the firms Nearco Crisis Positioning Strategies and Grup Inmobiliari Cierco SA for this purpose. A family lawyer asserts that his clients would not have hired Eliminalia if they had known of his techniques.

Xavier Mayol Gonzales

The former Deputy Director General of the extinct BPA hired Eliminalia in 2017 to deindex 18 news articles published in EL PAÍS, El Mundo and Cinco Días, among others. Mayol paid 13,156 euros. The former manager, who is under investigation in Andorra, has declined to answer questions from EL PAÍS.

Jose Nogueira Garcia

Galician shipowner extradited by Uruguay in 2008 for his involvement in a drug trafficking network operating in cocaine between the Río de la Plata and the Spanish coast. Involved in Operation Hurricane, which enabled the high seas hijacking of the mother ship Río Manzanares with 5,000 pounds of cocaine. He was sentenced to nine years in prison. Between 2018 and 2019 he paid Eliminalia €17,725 for deleting messages from newspapers such as La Voz de Galicia and headlines such as “Uruguay extradites José Nogueira from Arousa, arrested as head of a drug trafficking network”. This newspaper tried unsuccessfully to collect the shipowner’s version.

Paul Abasolo Amantegui

The former Portugalete footballer was sentenced to three years in prison for sexually abusing three women and was pardoned in 2011. He paid 21,445 euros to deindex more than 30 links with messages about his abuses in Abc, El Mundo, El Confidencial and EITB. according to his 2018 contract. Abasolo has refused to reply to this newspaper.

Antonio Aguilera Sanchez

Partner of producer and ventriloquist José Luis Moreno, alleged ringleader of Operation Titella (puppet in Catalan) who is investigating a network that has committed millions of dollars in bank fraud. His contract dates from 2020 and provides for a payment of at least 5,173 euros for the deletion of news about this conspiracy, which allegedly took out loans that he failed to pay and diverted abroad. “We have decided to block any kind of relationship [con Eliminalia] as soon as we determined that their way of working was not consistent with our good practices,” says Andrea Baggio, an executive at ReputationUp, the intermediary Aguilera used to hire Eliminalia, according to the documents.

Antonio Herrero Lazaro

Arrested in Operation Pompeii which dismantled a network of brothels in Spain and laundered money. A judge of the regional court assigned 32 people identified in this plot to a tax fraud in the amount of 111 million euros. At the top is Herrero, who, between 2015 and 2017, for 15,531 euros, the disappearance of 17 messages about the case in laverdademurcia.es, Interviú (Reportage Los amos de los brothels), elperiodico.com and burbuja.info (The king of the brothels) . Through his lawyer Jesús Miana, the businessman has declined to reply to this newspaper.

Tomás Sanchez Pacheco

Alleged real estate scammer arrested 15 times He hired Eliminalia between 2020 and 2021. He paid out 20,000 euros because, among other things, he had hidden information about his alleged criminal activities on the Internet telecinco.es and forums such as burbuja.info. This newspaper has unsuccessfully tried to collect his version.

Eloy Alvarez Suárez

Endocrinologist sentenced to eight years in prison and disqualified by the Provincial Court of León for sexually abusing three teenagers. He paid Eliminalia €1,391 in 2018 for hiding 10 messages about his case. This newspaper has unsuccessfully tried to collect his version.

Victor Bayona Viedma

Local police have been sentenced to two years in prison for violence against a detainee from Trinidad and Tobago. His 2021 contract includes a payment of €1,028 to have information about his case removed. This newspaper has unsuccessfully tried to collect his version.

David Vargas Pino

Priest expelled from church in 2013 after sex scandal. He was arrested by the Mossos d’Esquadra for defrauding and plundering widows and vulnerable people. The contract with Eliminalia does not indicate the amount paid. This newspaper has unsuccessfully tried to collect his version.

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