Eliminalia, the Catalan company dedicated to cleaning up the reputation on the Internet with disinformation techniques, worked to try to unlink some twenty critical news from search engines with Arsenio Fernández de Mesa, deputy of the PP between 1989 and 2012 and general director of the Civil Guard between 2011 and 2016.
According to the documents to which EL PAÍS and the consortium of journalists
Forbidden Stories have had access,
Eliminalia had Fernández de Mesa as a client in 2019.
And he worked so that news in media such as cadenaser.com, huffingtonpost.es, eldiario.es, publico.es, laregion.es, canarias-semanal.org, diaridegirona.cat, deia.eus, galiciaconfidencial.com, would disappear from the Internet. ferrol360.es and the website losgenoveses.net.
The articles to be exterminated dealt with the signing in 2017 of the former senior position as an independent director of Red Eléctrica Española, where he received an annual salary of 130,742 euros and 1,500 per month in allowances;
the past of him allegedly linked to the Falange or a controversial portrait in which the former head of the armed institute wore 14 medals.
Eliminalia charged 7,502 euros for his work.
A director of the audiovisual services company RPG Informática SA, which is a contractor for the armed institute, appears as a contact person between Fernández de Mesa and Eliminalia.
Despite the voluminous file of the Catalan firm, which included 33 documents, the former director general of the Civil Guard denies having hired their services.
He also denies having paid for the jobs detailed in his file.
More information
The Civil Guard general accused of the 'Barracks case' torpedoed the investigation in 2017
The company RPG Informática SA disassociates itself from any relationship with Eliminalia, despite the fact that in the registry of this company the email and mobile number of its director of the commercial area Raúl Porta appears as a contact person.
The file also includes the corporate landline telephone number of the company's headquarters in Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid) and an email from another executive whose identity RPG Informática SA has not wanted to reveal.
Likewise, the name of Ricardo Galán appears, a person whom this newspaper has not been able to identify.
Among the documentation, there is also a power of attorney from February 22, 2019 granted and signed by Fernández de Mesa to Eliminalia to exercise the rectification of the news from the aforementioned media and act before the Spanish Agency for Data Protection (AEPD).
The file also includes the DNI scanned on both sides of the former head of the armed institute and a personal email from Gmail with which this newspaper has communicated with Fernández de Mesa.
Raúl Porta, manager of the commercial area of RPG Informática SA who appears as a contact person, answers by phone that he has "no idea" why his name appears in the Eliminalia file of the former general director of the Civil Guard.
He denies having hired this company and, when asked if he knows the PP deputy for seven legislatures (1989-2012), Government delegate in Galicia (2000-2004) and advisor to the Minister of Public Administration (2004), He responds like this: “I met him at some point.
He did military service in Ferrol 35 years ago, but I have no friendship ”.
Contractor of the armed institute between 2011 and 2016
RPG Informática SA is a regular supplier of the Civil Guard.
During Fernández de Mesa's tenure (2011-2016), this company obtained four awards for the maintenance of 32 image display and reception systems.
He invoiced 1,390,789 euros for these works, confirms a spokesman for the armed institute.
The Eliminalia file on the ex-politician of the PP includes four forms to request search engines the so-called right to be forgotten, which allows results to be unlinked in the name of a user who justifies that their information is obsolete, lacks relevance or public interest.
Through this request, the main search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo) can access the request and, if it is denied, the user can contact the Spanish Agency for Data Protection.
The requests to Google are signed by Olga Atrochenco and Andrei Welsi, supposed employees of Eliminalia.
In one of the claims, it is requested that the entry “Biography of a fascist” published on the Tarkoteka blog on February 21, 2014 be disassociated from the Internet. In another, the disappearance of a news item from the Cadena Ser website is requested. and another from eldiario.es titled “The gardener who wanted to be a military man and ended up in the electricity sector” on February 2, 2017. The opinion article “Study or you will end up like Arsenio Fernández de Mesa”, appeared in the Orense newspaper La Región on February 2, 2017, he also placed himself in the peephole of the Catalan firm.
Atrochenco, the alleged false name used by Eliminalia, also required the disappearance of several ironic tweets.
One of them was titled Los Genoveses, alluding to the PP headquarters on Calle Génova in Madrid.
The commission from Fernández de Mesa to Eliminalia was 86% completed, according to the application of the Catalan company.
The documentation that Eliminalia handled on Fernández de Mesa includes a section on invoices and payments in which the phrase “
payments made
” appears.
There, there are fertilizers worth 1,750 euros (June 19, 2019);
3,578 (May 7, 2019);
and 2,250 (November 24, 2020).
Eliminalia has billed millions of euros by eliminating information that affects the reputation of its clients, from 54 countries.
With 774 clients, Spain is its main market, followed by Italy (300 users), Mexico (159), the United Kingdom (126) and Colombia (73).
The firm resorts to various disinformation tactics such as sending fraudulent requests to the media on the grounds that they included already published information or deceiving search engines such as Google with the creation of positive news, among other tricks.
To do this, it uses dozens of fraudulent portals with a real appearance such as
Le Monde France, London New Times
, and
CNNEWS Today.
Founded in 2013 by Diego Sánchez Jiménez, a thirty-something who presents himself as a "self-made" entrepreneur, Eliminalia has extended its network to 12 countries such as Italy, Switzerland, Turkey and the US.
José María Hill Prados, 62, founder of the Russian children's shelter organization Padres para Siempre, happens to be the strategist of this company, whose clients have included numerous people involved in cases of corruption, money laundering, sexual abuse and drug trafficking. .
Just when it was being investigated by an international journalistic consortium of which this newspaper was a part, the firm changed its name to Idata Protection SL on January 20, according to the Mercantile Registry.
investigacion@elpais.es
Fernández de Mesa: "I did not hire any campaign"
J. GIL / JM IRUJO
The former director general of the Civil Guard under the presidency of Mariano Rajoy, Arsenio Fernández de Mesa, denies having hired the Spanish firm Eliminalia during his tenure (2011-2016).
His client file corresponds to 2019. The former head of the armed institute has responded to the questions by email through the Gmail account that appears in his Eliminalia file.
“I have not carried out any order [a Eliminalia] in this sense for an image campaign during my tenure as director of the Civil Guard.
I don't know anyone in Eliminalia, I have never contracted anything with Eliminalia, I have never paid Eliminalia a single cent for any service”.
Regarding the power granted to this firm, he assures that the document dates from 2019, three years after leaving his position in the armed institute.
"No public contractor has paid any amount nor have I carried out any order in this regard during my tenure as general director of the Civil Guard," he adds.
“I fully assume my political life, from beginning to end, all the statements I have made and the criticisms that may have been made of me, without any objection, even if I did not agree with them and some from his own newspaper”, he points out.
RPG, the audiovisual services firm from Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid) that appears as an intermediary between Fernández de Mesa and Eliminalia, disassociates itself from this contract.
“RPG Ingeniería Audiovisual has not made any payment for the alleged invoice mentioned […].
Eliminalia has never been a supplier to said company”, this firm responds by mail, admitting that its business relationship with the Civil Guard goes back 18 years.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I'm already a subscriber