Spanish 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. And that exposes this company’s disinformation ploys to destroy digital content. Using fake websites or fraudulently applying 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.
Eliminalia’s customer relationship in Latin America includes more than 400 citizens and companies. Mexico (159 users), Colombia (73), Argentina (51) and Peru (32) top the list. A list ranging from corrupt ex-governors like Mexican PRI member Javier Duarte of Veracruz to doctors with dark pasts linked to DINA (National Intelligence Directorate), the repressive arm of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship Stand (1973).-1990) as Hernán Horacio Taricco Lavin. There are also relatives of Chavista leaders allegedly bribed by the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht, such as María Eugenia Baptista Zacarías, wife of former Venezuelan Transport and Public Works Minister Haiman El Troudi, and businessmen accused of money laundering for Mexico’s Los Zetas cartel becomes. Such is the case of Miguel Ángel Colorado Cessa.
Under strict confidentiality clauses, Eliminalia has managed to wipe the fingerprints of an Italian company fined for selling spy systems to the Syrian regime (Area Spa) and a Swiss bank that housed the untold fortunes of suspected Venezuelan money launderers ( CBH Compagnie Bancaire Helvétique). . Two investigative journalism portals, Maka Angola and The Elephant, have also been targeted by this company, which uses the slogan “we erage your past”.
Fees paid by politicians, drug dealers, sex abusers, white-collar criminals and struggling businesspeople to evaporate their digital past range from $500 for a website — according to a 2018 contract — to $427,584. Billing depends on the items to be neutralized and their 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.
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 supposed customer benefits and bury information intended to be marginalized on the internet.
For this purpose, according to technical analyst Tord Lundstrom, Eliminalia uses a network of 600 websites that it controls through its company Maidan Holding in Florida (USA). Dozens of fraudulent, legit-looking websites such as Le Monde France, London New Times, and CNNEWS Today have hosted news about the company’s customers.
Eliminalia was founded in 2013 by Diego (Didac) Sánchez Jiménez, a thirty-year-old who presents himself as a “self-made” entrepreneur and is the author of the book “The Secret of Success”. Eliminalia has expanded its network to 12 countries. Italy, Switzerland, Turkey and the US are part of 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.
Along with Sánchez is the business strategist 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 choice of Ukraine as the epicenter of Eliminalia operations was chosen by Spanish intelligence services until last year for economic reasons. “Ukraine 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 deal with the consortium’s journalists. The Paris Montmartre law firm, represented by lawyers David and Pascal Winter, points out 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 quiet floor of a commercial building on Avenida Portal de l’Àngel in Barcelona 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 key customers in Latin America. Their records include the fees they paid and the content they wanted erased from cyberspace.
Javier Duarte
The man who was governor of Veracruz – Mexico’s third most populous state – between 2010 and 2016 is now serving a nine-year sentence on money laundering and criminal association charges. This PRI member, arrested in Guatemala in 2017 as he was planning to flee, pleaded guilty to corruption and reached a settlement with the Public Prosecutor’s Office (PGR), which attributed $13 million to the looting.
Eliminalia has been commissioned to delete dozens of information on the network and Duarte’s YouTube videos, mostly published in 2020, in media and portals such as sinembargo.mx, publimetro.com or vanguardia.com.mx. The Spanish company collected $32,000 for this work from the highway operation and maintenance company through businessman Jaime Antonio Porres Fernández Cavadas, who, according to the newspaper El Universal, is a friend of Duarte and did business in Veracruz during his tenure. Headlines like “Duarte’s hotel and apartment building in Spain on display” or “Duarte sold a house in the United States to his uncle for $10, according to documents” were on Eliminalia’s radar.
Pedro Miguel makes a beard
Former PRI leader and bullfighting enthusiast, secretary-general of the Autonomous Confederation of Workers and Employees of Mexico (CATEM), knocked on the controversial Spanish company’s door. Haces Barba hired Eliminalia for 110,000 (her file doesn’t specify the currency) so that 300 news links published between 2019 and 2020 would disappear from the network. The target was articles like “Senator Pedro Haces: reported for robbery and gun possession” and reports accusing him of being a misogynist after allegedly assuring women “should be less provocative with their clothing.” The former PRI member also hired the Spanish firm to deindex information linking him to former Veracruz governor Javier Duarte.
Hernan Horacio Taricco Lavin
Physician with ties to DINA, the feared political police of Augusto Pinochet’s Chilean dictatorship. In 2020, he was subsequently charged with aiding and abetting the 1977 murder of Army Corporal and former DINA officer Manuel Lyton, who was poisoned with sarin gas. In 2013, attorney Carmen Hertz, current deputy, named him on a list of doctors linked to the repression. reports Rocio Montes.
Taricco Lavin paid Eliminalia a total of $5,900 in August 2019 to deindex blog posts with headlines such as “Doctors, Pinochetistas, and Torturers,” articles on memoriaviva.com calling him a criminal, and information denouncing the censorship of a program on Chilean TV Channel 13, where his alleged connection to the dictatorship was discussed. Radio Villa Francia’s “Héctor Taricco Lavin, part of a long history of torture doctors” was one of the pieces of information that escaped.
Miguel Angel Colorado Cessa
The former candidate of Mexico’s National Action Party (PAN) in the 2009 federal election was named by the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime Investigations (SEIDO) as a suspected Zeta money launderer. And he paid Eliminalia $9,000 in 2018 to delete or deindex 32 news links from the network that linked him to organized crime in media such as aristeguinoticias.com, sinembargo.mx or proceso.com.mx.
Seguritech
The Mexican surveillance camera company wanted to destroy its bad reputation on the Internet. A 2018 investigation by Proceso magazine uncovered alleged flaws in its surveillance equipment. The government of Miguel Ángel Mancera, head of government of Mexico City between 2012 and 2018, awarded Seguritech a $125 million contract to deploy 501,000 neighborhood alarms. According to the weekly newspaper, the devices were bought above the market price. The company hired Eliminalia for $9,900 to attempt to remove dozens of articles such as “Seguritech: Bad Service, Millions in Profits.”
Majed Khalil Majzoub
Chavismo-affiliated businessman with interests in Venezuela, United States and Panama. Of Lebanese origin, Nicolás Maduro’s government awarded him the Lácteos los Andes company in 2020. The company was expropriated by the Hugo Chávez government in 2008 and, according to Armando.info, became part of the state conglomerate PDVSA. In 2004, the US revoked this businessman’s visa for his alleged money laundering activities and links to Islamic radicalism, according to the media cited above. In April 2018, Majed Khalil Majzoub commissioned Eliminalia to deindex news on portals such as cuentasclarasdigital.org.
Isaac Sultan
Venezuelan sea merchant businessman with Chavismo ties who managed the warehouses in Puerto Cabello. Through a complicated corporate framework that includes Luxembourg firm Fimis Holding, the company acquired a super-luxe central building in Madrid for $28.3 million in 2014 and an apartment in Florida in 2016, according to Armando.info. He hired Eliminalia for $100,000 in 2019 to try to hide information.
Maria Eugenia Baptista Zacarias
Wife of Haiman El Troudi, Minister of Transport and Public Works of Venezuela between 2013 and 2015 and Miranda State Deputy until 2020. El Troudi allegedly collected $90 million in bribes from Brazilian construction company Odebrecht through an elaborate money laundering mask from Grupo Espíritu Santo and wo his wife played a role, according to The Pandora Papers. In 2013, after El Troudi took over the ministerial portfolio, Baptista Zacarías bought a duplex apartment in the historic Chiado district of Lisbon for 1.5 million, according to Armando.info. Eliminalia charged 30,000 (the currency is not specified on the invoice) for trying to deindex dozens of critical pieces of information about the ex-minister’s wife, who bribed him from Odebrecht on elpais.com, armando.info, Portal.com and aporrea .org connected.
Joaquin Leal
The 30-year-old Mexican entrepreneur is considered by the United States Treasury Department to be an accomplice in the oil exchange network with Venezuela pioneered by Alex Saab, the alleged frontman of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The businessman, with two other partners, founded Suministros Sustentables de Energía en México (Sumex), the first private company authorized to resell electricity in Mexico. Leal paid Eliminalia a total of $380 in March 2020.
Diego Marynberg
Nicknamed Maradona, this Israeli-Argentinian businessman has close ties to controversial Venezuelan magnates. His name came to light in 2020 in the FinCEN files, a leak of 2,100 reports of suspicious activity by banks sent to the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). According to armando.info, the revelation showed that American banks and authorities were pursuing Marynberg through the movements of at least two companies: the Adar Latam fund and the financial firm Mercantil Valores. Eliminalia charged 17,200 (no currency) to deindex about thirty pieces of information about Marynberg from portals such as lanacion.com.ar, elfaro-israel.com or poderypolitica.com.ar.
Wisam Mohammed Nassar
Using the pseudonym William da Pioneer, this Lebanese businessman was arrested in Foz de Yguazú (Brazil) in 2021 for alleged membership of a child corruption network. According to the Paraguayan newspaper ABC, he paid for sexual relations with minors, influencers and YouTubers. Mohamad Nassar paid Eliminalia at least $800 in October 2020 so that information such as “The child sexual exploitation industry has a new chapter” published on portalcis.com.br would disappear from the internet.
James Shasha
Gambling and hospitality entrepreneur residing in Argentina. He heads the company HCI SA and manages the Panoramic Casinos, the Café Central and the hotels Iguazú Grand and Panoramic Grand, among other things, according to the Clarín newspaper. Through LJ Shasha, the businessman granted Eliminalia powers of attorney in November 2018 and paid $1,500 to try to remove or deindex a dozen messages from the network, such as “They have hijacked casinos and hotels in the border triangle that are linked to the terrorist organization Hezbollah” published in diariodepocito.com.ar or “James Shasha, a respected philanthropist or a terrorist financier?” [James Shasha, ¿un distinguido filántropo o un terrorista financiero?”] at gfatf.org.
Ronald Oswaldo Caballero Cantero
Known as Careconi, he was a suspected drug trafficker operating in Paraguay, working as secretary to drug lord Pedro Pablo Quevedo Medina, Peter Medina, believed to be the mastermind of the 2010 attack suffered by then-President of Paraguay’s Congress Robert Acevedo. According to Paraguayan newspaper ABC, he died in 2017 at the age of 39 after his white BMW X6 truck crashed into a tractor blade. Careconi signed a power of attorney in favor of Eliminalia in February 2016 to attempt to evaporate information such as “Three dangerous people fall” from the Paraguayan ABC from the network.
German Trujillo Manrique
Businessman convicted of diverting Colombian public funds from the School Food Plan (PAE), a program to feed students in schools. According to El Tiempo, a court ruling in Bucaramanga, Colombia, confirmed that Trujillo Manrique used the looted money to buy an apartment. Trujillo Manrique hired Eliminalia to deindex information from eltiempo.com and diariodelhuila.com about “the food cartel” in March 2017 for $2,549.
Morris Harp
He was Minister of Trade of Colombia under the presidency of Ernesto Samper (1994-1998). He hired the Spanish firm to “remove content on Google” and 26 links in August 2017. There is no information about the content of your articles to be deleted.
Silvana relatives
Former manager of a hotel owned by former Argentine President Kirchner. He died of cancer in 2018. In June 2017, he paid Eliminalia a total of $2,100 to deindex four articles such as “Caso Relats: the curse of the Kirchner Administration” published on www.noticias.perfil.com.
EL PAÍS has tried unsuccessfully to obtain the versions of all of the company’s clients mentioned in this article.
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