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.
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