Sensational: German TV journalist received 600 thousand euros from an oligarch friend of Putin. One day will those paid by the other side also investigate?
Influential German TV journalist and author Hubert Seipel, who interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin and wrote two books about him, received 600,000 euros from companies associated with oligarch Aleksei Mordashov, close to Putin and placed on the sanctions list Westerners, a joint journalistic investigation has discovered . Seipel works for the German public broadcaster ARD and this made the case considered even more serious.
Seipel is known in Germany for an exclusive 2014 interview with Putin and also produced a documentary about him.
The investigation, conducted by German broadcaster ZDF, Der Spiegel magazine and German investigative newspaper Paper Trailer Media, alleged that Seipel, an award-winning journalist, received the money in installments via a Cyprus-based company linked to Mordashov for two books featured by many favorable portraits of Putin.
According to confidential files of Cyprus-based financial services companies obtained by German journalists, in 2018 Seipel, renowned in Germany as one of the top independent experts on Russia, signed a €600,000 sponsorship deal to write and promote a book on “political climate in Russia” – an unusually high rate in the German publishing industry. It must be said that this happened before the war in Ukraine.
The book was published in 2021 under the title Putin's Power: Why Europe Needs Russia, following an earlier biography of Putin published in 2015 entitled Putin: Inner Views Of Power.
In the documents obtained by the investigation there is a handwritten note indicating that Seipel may have already received money in 2013 to prepare Putin's biography.
Seipel, who said he had met Putin “almost 100 times” and was one of the very few Western journalists to have direct access to the Russian leader, did not warn his readers or the publisher of a possible conflict of interest.
Seipel confirmed to ZDF that he had received “financial support through Mordashov”, but said that this “has not influenced the content of his books in any way”, pointing to a contractual clause according to which the author “has no obligation in with the sponsor in relation to the book project.”
The television station where Seipel works said it had not been aware of the payment by the oligarch.
Mordashov, a steel and banking magnate who last year faced sanctions from the United States, the European Union and Britain over his close ties to the Kremlin, owns a majority stake in the German travel company TUI.
He is one of Russia's richest people, with a net worth estimated by Forbes at nearly $21 billion.
But now we see the other side of the coin: several newspapers, almost a search consortium, worked to find the journalist paid by a Russian tycoon. Will an equal consortium be formed to find journalists paid by American billionaires or the French government?
So, just out of curiosity…
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The article Sensational: German TV journalist received 600 thousand euros from oligarch friend of Putin. One day will those paid by the other side also investigate? comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/clamoroso-giornalista-della-tv-tedesca-ha-ricevuto-600-mila-euro-da-oligarca-amico-di-putin-un-giorno-indagheranno-anche-quelli-pagati-dallaltra-parte/ on Wed, 15 Nov 2023 18:00:18 +0000.