…Hazim Nada assumed that a competitor had planted the item. But soon other wild allegations began appearing—too many to be chalked up to industry chatter. On January 5, 2018, Sylvain Besson, a journalist who had written a book purporting to tie Youssef Nada to a supposed Islamist conspiracy, published an article, in the Geneva newspaper Le Temps, claiming that Lord Energy was a cover for a Muslim Brotherhood cell. “The children of the historical leaders of the organization have recycled themselves in oil and gas”, Besson wrote. A new item in Africa Intelligence hinted darkly that Lord Energy employees had “been active in the political-religious sphere.” Headlines sprang up on Web sites, such as Medium, that had little editorial oversight: “Lord Energy: The Mysterious Company Linking Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood”; “Compliance: Muslim Brotherhood Trading Company Lord Energy Linked to Crédit Suisse.” A Wikipedia entry for Lord Energy suddenly included descriptions of alleged ties to terrorism.
Within 6 months, Brero promised, Jendoubi’s image could be “reshaped” with “negative elements.” The cost: €150,000.
Rumors spread through Arab news outlets and European Web publications that Jendoubi was a tool of Qatar, a failed businessman, and tied to extremists. A French-language article posted on Medium suggested that he might be “an opportunist disguised as a human-rights hero.” An article in English asked, “Is UN-expert Kamel Jendoubi too close to Qatar?” Alp created or altered Wikipedia entries about Jendoubi, in various languages, by citing claims from unreliable, reactionary, or pro-government news outlets in Egypt and Tunisia. Jendoubi told me that he’d been perplexed by the flurry of slander that followed the war-crimes report. “Wikipedia is a monster!” he told me. He had managed to clean up the French entry, but the English-language page still stymied him. He said, “You speak English—can you help?”
…Alp quickly put the Emiratis’ money to work. An Alp employee named Raihane Hassaine e-mailed drafts of d—ning Wikipedia entries. On an invoice dated May 31, 2018, the company paid Nina May, a freelance writer in London, £625 for 5 online articles, published under pseudonyms and based on notes supplied by Alp, that attacked Lord Energy for links to terrorism and extremism. (Hassaine did not respond to requests for comment. May told me that she had worked for Alp in the past but had signed a nondisclosure agreement.) May and a fictitious French writer concocted by Alp—“the freelance journalist ‘Tanya Klein’, whom we created and who is becoming an expert on the European MB”—also published articles about the youth-group network headed by Youssef Himmat, the Lord Energy employee. The articles described the network as a terrorist-recruiting branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. In reality, the network, the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations, was funded by the E.U. It campaigned against antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate speech.
Himmat, who grew up in Switzerland, told me that he considered himself to be a classical liberal. Not only did Alp’s online campaign cost him his lucrative job at Lord Energy; it prompted banks to cancel his checking accounts and credit cards, and the rumors still make it difficult for him to find employment, borrow money, or even open an online checking account. “What did we do to deserve this?” he remembered asking himself when Nada relayed his discoveries. “We were caught in the crossfire.” (He is no longer president of the Muslim-youth network and now makes a much diminished living trading commodities on his own.)
Alp operatives bragged to the Emiratis that they had successfully thwarted Nada’s efforts to correct the disparaging Lord Energy entry on Wikipedia. “We requested the assistance of friendly moderators who countered the repeated attacks”, Brero wrote in an “urgent update” to the Emiratis in June 2018. “The objective remains to paralyze the company.” To pressure others to shun Lord Energy, Alp added dubious allegations about the company to the Wikipedia entries for Credit Suisse and for an Algerian oil monopoly. And an operative using the pseudonym Laurent Martin lobbied World-Check about Lord Energy’s alleged “terrorism.”
Nada could not believe how easy it had been to persuade lenders to shun him. “Just a few blogs and some guy with a fake name and Proton Mail account”, he told me.
[As of 2023-083-27, some of the dark PR edits are still live on English Wikipedia.]