LONDON — It has become standard in the Western world to expect to find information about anyone and anything online. Individuals and corporations consult search engines to form opinions about potential friends, employees, business partners, or supported candidates. Negative information can cost jobs, deals, marriages, and lawsuits. Some people and companies invest in expensive online reputation management campaigns, partially recognizing this fact.
Counteracting bad press has become so important that successful public relations firms and private advisors can set their own prices. The best in this field are often the ones nobody knows. However, public relations strategies, aimed at reviving a public image, fundamentally rely on analyzing claims against a client to ascertain credibility and undermine critics. Generally speaking, companies and exposed individuals are expected to take an active role in preserving their image. Some are discreet, while others are quite loud. It goes without saying that the last thing a party that wants to avoid public exposure should do is to draw more attention to themselves, right?
Not in Venezuela. Consider the case of Derwick Associates, a company that seemingly emerged overnight and secured 12 thermoelectric contracts from high-ranking officials in Chávez’s regime within just 14 months. Twelve contracts worth potentially billions of dollars in just fourteen months. A journalist in Caracas, César Batiz, began to suspect something was off with Derwick’s undefined dealings, partly due to his previous experience in the electrical sector. Batiz started asking questions about Derwick Associates—questions any competent journalist would have: why was this company favored over others? Why did the government award so many contracts to a company with no prior record? Why were public bids not issued? Who decided what, where, and when? How much public money was spent? Were the projects completed? Who are the people behind Derwick? In short, the type of scrutiny expected of any company doing public business in a democracy.
The problem is, Venezuela is not a democracy, and Derwick Associates is not a typical company. All contracts awarded to Derwick were necessarily decided by an unidentified high-ranking official who almost certainly received a hefty commission from the deal. The Venezuelan contracting system operates like a revolving door, where contract grants are conditioned upon commission percentages. Subsequently, Batiz began digging and hit some roadblocks. His inquiries led him to public institutions that flatly refused to answer his legitimate questions. So he upped the ante and took several parties to court, which staunchly refused to compel public servants to disclose information about contracts funded with public money. There is no such thing as a Freedom of Information Act in Chávez’s socialist paradise. Batiz’s editor, Eleazar Díaz Rangel, became interested in the story and personally approached the prosecutor’s office to formally request an investigation. Again, nothing came of it.
Derwick did not respond to Batiz, his articles, or his requests for information. Instead, they sued Oscar García Mendoza, a banker, in a Florida court, for supposedly orchestrating a “defamation campaign.” They didn’t sue Batiz, nor did they go after his editor, Díaz Rangel, or the newspaper where Batiz works, Ultimas Noticias. No, Derwick preferred to sue a banker with no connections to Batiz, Díaz Rangel, or Ultimas Noticias. They filed the lawsuit not in Venezuela, but in the USA. Not in Spanish, but in English, which facilitated the dissemination of information about their actions online. One can only wonder: why?
Batiz’s findings never received much publicity in Venezuela. Just another corruption scandal during the most corrupt administration our utterly corrupt country has ever seen. Very few eyebrows were raised there. But then Derwick instructed its New York-based lawyers to sue Oscar García Mendoza in Florida, and people began to take notice. Bloggers started questioning the move and published more information about the issue. Thus, Derwick, a completely unknown company run by two individuals, went from anonymity to being the subject of investigation by U.S. Federal Agencies. If there were ever an award for how not to counteract bad press, Derwick would surely be a deserving winner. Their strategy of suing, threatening, issuing press releases, and harassing critics could only be described as foolish in a psychological sense, as, predictably, it produced results exactly opposite of what they desired.
A year ago, only a handful of people knew about Derwick. Now governments know about Derwick, banks know about Derwick, authorities know about Derwick, and even Wikipedia has an entry about them, and worse yet, Google and its omnipresent archives have many more entries about Derwick.
So here’s a free and unsolicited piece of advice for companies like Derwick Associates or Smartmatic trying to deal with perfectly valid criticism: be discreet, quietly fly into the horizon in your Falcon 2000 with your ill-gotten fortune, knowing that the more you shout and attack, the more attention you will attract. As another blogger rightly pointed out: intimidating bloggers and journalists is never a good strategy.