Our View: Focus on video’s source obscures corruption claims
The investigative committee, under former supreme court judge Andreas Paschalides, has discovered the creators of the 12-minute video which exposed the ‘money for access to the president’ methods. Black Cube, an intelligence company set up by former Israeli intelligence agents with a record for clandestine, political interference in several European states, reportedly, set up the entire operation which duped men very close to President Nikos Christodoulides.
The video, which was posted on the social media account of an Emily Thompson, had former energy minister Giorgos Lakkotrypis – a close associated of the president – telling a foreign ‘investor’ that Christodoulides accepted undeclared payments under the table for his election campaign and the investor could use this donation method. In the same video the director of the president’s office Charalambos Charalambous, told an ‘investor’ that he could gain access to the president by making a big donation to the ‘independent social support body’ run by the president’s wife. Charalambous subsequently resigned while insisting he had done nothing wrong.
Rather than investigate these filmed admissions of corrupt practices, by people very close to the president, the main concern of the authorities was to establish who had made the video and fooled Lakkotrypis and Charalambous into speaking on camera. The presidential palace message was that the president had been targeted in what constituted a hybrid attack and government sources suggested that the Russian Federation was behind it. Black Cube had links with Moscow, as some years ago it was reported it had interfered in Hungary to help the election of Viktor Orban.
According to a Politis report, all the footage obtained by Black Cube – said to be 30 hours’ worth of footage – was handed over to the committee headed by Paschalides. Black Cube, it was reported, had not been hired to carry out the job by a state but by a private company, the Politis report jumping to the conclusion that the video was not a case of hybrid war. Could the company that gave the job to Black Cube have been working for a state? What private company would want to target Christodoulides and expose corrupt practices in Cyprus?
From what has been said, the government must have come to some arrangement with whoever paid for the making of the video, otherwise Black Cube would not have handed all the raw footage, which belonged to its client, to Paschalides. The question is what concessions could President Christodoulides have been asked to make by the private company or state agency that paid to produce the video, in order to be given all the footage? There may have been more damning revelations of corrupt government practices in the raw footage, which Christodoulides would not have wanted to stay in the possession of anyone who could use it against him.
All we can do now is wait for the report of Paschalides’ investigation, which will be finished in early June, and what decision the attorney-general would take.