Cambridge Analytica's Fossil Fuel Connections
Several key directors at Cambridge Analytica's parent company have direct connections to the fossil fuel industry, records show.motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gymvaw/cambridge-analyticas-fossil-fuel-connections-scl-group
[some excerpts but the whole thing is interesting]
[...]But several key directors at Cambridge Analytica's parent company, SCL Group, also have close ties to the fossil fuel industry, according to business records filed with the British government, fossil fuel company presentations obtained by Motherboard, and employee LinkedIn pages.
The connections show that, yet again, there is often crossover between fossil fuel interests and politically focused firms.
Big coal
[...]British company records, however, show that SCL Elections had another director, Christian Patrick Teroerde, who joined the company just months after it was incorporated. Teroerde went on to hold a one-year director role at SCL Elections from February 2013 to 2014.
Teroerde’s position coincided with a simultaneous role he held at another company, Hanson Asset Management, where he has been co-founding managing director since 2010.
Hanson Asset Management was set-up to manage the wealth of the Hanson family, whose fortune was built under the leadership of the late Lord James Hanson—a Thatcherite industrialist who donated millions to the Conservative Party. Tereorde works directly under Lord Hanson’s son, Robert, who chairs the board.
One of the major contributors to Lord Hanson’s wealth was the burgeoning American coal industry.
Among Hanson’s major acquisitions, for instance, was the Peabody Holding Company, the largest coal producer in the United States in the 1990s. The firm was sold and grew into Peabody Energy—now the largest private-sector coal company in the world.
In April 2016, Peabody filed for bankruptcy due to plummeting coal prices. Trump’s election victory, which Cambridge Analytica helped target ads for, turned Peabody’s imminent collapse around. One day after Trump’s win, Peabody shares surged by over 50 percent, and six months later the global coal giant came out of bankruptcy.
Cambridge Analytica’s connection to Hanson’s wealth appears to have been close during that founding year. The company correspondence address for Teroerde’s directorship at SCL Elections was the same address as Hanson Asset Management, meaning he essentially fulfilled his duties to the company from the Hanson office.
Big Oil
[...]One such company is Phi Energy Group, a short-lived oil venture where Wheatland was a director from 2014 to 2016. According to an internal company presentation deck, Phi Energy’s focus was “exploring opportunities” in Libya, the US, Africa and Eastern Europe.
[...]According to Kreimeia’s LinkedIn profile, he was a “non-executive director” of Hatton International from 2012 to 2016. That profile not only refers to Hatton’s work “with defence and aerospace companies”, but further describes how Hatton “supports client companies, particularly in the energy industry, to develop financing strategies that will deliver the strategic objectives and help bring new products and propositions to market.”
The regions where Phi Energy/Hatton’s energy work was carried out include Iraq and Libya, both subjected to US-UK military interventions.
Kreimeia’s Phi Energy bio, for instance, depicts him as a key player in negotiating refining agreements in key Middle East countries, specifically assisting major EU refineries in negotiations with the Libyan National Oil Company (LNOC), the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Company and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). [ is this similar to the private colonisation wylie talked about? ]
Climate denialism
An investigation by DeSmogUK reveals that Cambridge Analytica is also embedded in a web of power denying climate change. Besides the Mercer funding, Cambridge Analytica has numerous ties to Vote Leave, the official British campaign to leave the European Union, which was chock full of politicians who rejected climate science.
Vote Leave was run by Dominic Cummings, a former head of strategy for the Conservative Party. The Vote Leave campaign paid £3.5m for Facebook profiling and advertising to AggregateIQ, a Canadian firm which had secretly licensed its data tools to SCL Elections.
Cummings is also connected to SCL Elections and Hanson Asset Management director Patrick Teroerde, through Lord Hanson. From 1999 to 2002, Cummings had run the anti-EU ‘Business for Sterling’ business lobby, founded by Lord Hanson. Neither Teroerde nor Cummings could be reached for comment.
The pro-fossil fuels agenda of the Vote Leave campaign was no secret.
One senior Vote Leave committee member, Andrea Leadsom, currently Leader of the House of Commons and previously energy and climate minister, admitted to questioning climate change science when she first got her ministerial job. During the Brexit campaign, she was aligned with a pressure group agitating for more fossil fuels and less renewables.
Two other Conservative politicians who supported Vote Leave, Owen Paterson and Matt Ridley, are “well-known allies of the UK’s most prominent climate science denial campaign group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation,” according to DeSmogUK.
And so we come full circle. Cambridge Analytica’s political associations with the Trump campaign in the US, and the Brexit campaign in the EU, overlap directly with the firm’s ties to major oil and gas companies and anti-science campaigning to deny climate change.
The story of this firm’s massive breach of Facebook to manipulate public opinion is not just about the increasing impunity of giant technology companies, nor their capacity to allow nefarious entities to interfere in our fragile democracies from outside.
It is about how technology has been used to subvert democracy from within—not by foreign powers—but by increasingly unaccountable corporate power, including those tied to the rampant exploitation of oil, gas and coal. It’s power that continues to hold great sway over governments on both sides of the Atlantic.