UPDATED Before diving into the connections of Fusion GPS with Venezuela, it’s important to note that this country is, by far, the most corrupt in Latin America. Its president, Nicolás Maduro, has the unique distinction of being the “individual who has done the most in the world to promote organized crime and corruption,” according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Maduro has had some noteworthy competitors in Vladimir Putin, Bashar Al-Assad, and Rodrigo Duterte. In the advancement of “criminal behavior and corruption,” the Venezuelan regime has allowed and encouraged the rise of various criminal gangs. One of the most notorious among them is Derwick Associates. This is where Fusion GPS enters the picture.
Let’s start with Tom Catan*, shown in the photo to the left. Catan is one of the three main founders of Fusion GPS. This photograph was taken by me in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, in 2006. At that time, Catan was with The Times of London and was there to cover the Venezuelan presidential race. I was asked to arrange an interview between the then-opposition candidate, Manuel Rosales, and a group of international journalists, including Catan.
Years later, we reunited in Spain. Catan came to my house for dinner, met my family and children while visiting and working on a story about the British expatriate community.
Not long after, I shared a story about my undercover work with dissidents in Cuba for the Human Rights Foundation. The idea was that since I had helped him with a few stories in the past, he might return the favor by speaking well to his editors or media contacts. That never happened.
In 2014, after extensive investigation and reporting on Derwick Associates, I learned that Fusion GPS, Catan’s firm, had been hired by Derwick Associates. I sent an email asking if that was indeed the case. Catan’s response was:
I’m not working on anything related to Venezuela, so I’m not sure I can help. Have you ever been to DC? It’d be great to catch up.
There’s a stay record at the Lido Hotel in Caracas, from July 21-24, 2014. In August, I confronted Catan:
“Aside from my recent email regarding the possible work your company might be doing in Venezuela, look… It would be shocking if one of your colleagues is working for the kind of thugs I’ve been exposing for years, and I’d hate to think that you were being economical with the truth about your company’s involvement with such people, to the point of denying participation.”
This time, his response was:
This is really creepy, Alek. Are you doing surveillance these days or what?
Fritsch flew to Caracas—on a private jet, as I was informed—with Adam Kaufmann (former chief investigator for the New York District Attorney), whose services Derwick Associates had also contracted. The purpose of the trip was to provide support (PR, spin, legal advice, etc.) for a meeting with Wall Street Journal reporters who had gone to Caracas to follow up on their coverage of the massive corruption scandal involving Derwick Associates.
The meeting went as planned. Kaufmann and Fusion GPS essentially managed to silence any further reporting from the WSJ. The fact that Catan, Fritsch, and Glenn Simpson (head of Fusion GPS) had previously worked for the WSJ likely helped. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to believe that El País of Spain conveniently decided to stop publishing my work just after breaking, potentially due to soft PR efforts from Catan’s wife, Begoña Cortina Segurola, with the then-editor for America at El País, Héctor Schamis.
As this article is about the much-discussed work of Fusion GPS, I’ll momentarily lower my standards and say that “source D” informed me that during the July 2014 meeting in Caracas, Derwick Associates spent most of their time talking about me and did not present any evidence to show that all acquisition contracts received from the Venezuelan regime (12 in a span of 14 months starting from 2009) were obtained legally, rather than through millions of dollars in bribes to high-ranking officials in Venezuela ( Diosdado Cabello and Rafael Ramírez among others). Currently, Derwick Associates is under criminal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, multiple federal agencies, the office of New York prosecutor Preet Bharara, and financial authorities in Switzerland.
In November 2014, just three months after Fritsch’s visit to Derwick in Caracas, my apartment in London was raided. Laptops were stolen, threats of sexual abuse against my children were made, and simultaneously a coordinated online smear campaign against me was launched. More threats were sent via registered mail from Tbilisi, Georgia. Fusion GPS’s hand may well have been behind the effort. Baseless and false accusations regarding my alleged involvement in car theft, extortion, homosexuality, spreading AIDS, drug trafficking, and pedophilia were published on social media, websites, and even by prominent opposition politicians in Venezuela linked to Derwick Associates. Family members were dragged into it: while my sister was accused of being Hugo Chávez‘s mistress, my mother, who died of cancer in 1983, was revived and put in charge of a drug cartel in Venezuela, Spain, and the U.S. in 2006.
Glenn Simpson’s antics (shown in the photo on the left) are under intense media scrutiny these days. His Fusion GPS team was hired to dig up and damage the reputation of Donald Trump, just as he had in the past with Republican Party donors. For the tasked work, Simpson subcontracted a former British spy, Christopher Steele. Together they prepared some stories regarding Trump’s alleged sexual escapades in Moscow. All of this remains unfounded to this day. Fusion GPS wants the world to take their fictional tales at face value, and they want to do so without presenting evidence.
Like Derwick’s thugs, who have spent thousands trying to find dirt on me, any kompromat found might be used to silence my investigations into their totally corrupt company. Every opportunity that Derwick has had to defend its integrity, whether with inquiring journalists, in trials, or criminal investigations, has been a spectacular failure. I know, in fact, that when given the opportunity to document and make official their obsession with me being some sort of paid agent, they refused. It still stands. The dossier producers who took Derwick’s dirty money have done to me, on a very small scale, what Fusion GPS has attempted with Trump.
That said, I’m very interested to see how Fusion GPS’s credibility is going to emerge from the mess they manufactured. However, their association with Steele caught my attention. It makes me wonder if the illegal surveillance in London, the assault on my apartment, and the threats against my family were partly organized by Fusion GPS’s connections in the UK. Given that I kept my new residence secret, even from my closest acquaintances, it puzzles me how on earth the thugs sent by Derwick found my address. London is not a small city. When one owns real estate, it’s quite simple: a two-minute search in property registration databases yields results, if they exist, just like those of Catan and Simpson in Washington DC. I don’t own property anywhere. So, if it wasn’t with the help of intelligence agents like Steele, how did they find me?
The PR success of Fusion GPS with the WSJ could not be replicated with Bloomberg, Reuters, and other media. Certainly, their efforts do not seem to have halted the U.S. Department of Justice’s attempts to press charges against corrupt Venezuelans. Derwick illegally received a public procurement deal worth over $2.2 billion, nearly half of which they stole. Business owners involved in the same scheme at the same time have already been prosecuted and charged with corruption. Crucially, the corrupt PDVSA officials involved with Derwick in the scheme have also pled guilty.
I believe that Derwick’s day of reckoning with the justice system will come, sooner or later. Will Catan call me creepy then?
ADDENDUM: This morning in my inbox, I received a link to yet another extraordinary exposé about Glenn Simpson’s work: it turns out that Fusion GPS is behind lobbying efforts in favor of the Kremlin:
The head of the opposition research firm behind the Trump dossier is linked to a secret campaign aimed at undermining the Magnitsky Act, a law that imposes sanctions on Russian criminals and which the Kremlin vehemently opposes, The Daily Caller can report.
The main advocate for this law, a British-American businessman named Bill Browder, tells TheDC that Glenn Simpson, head of Fusion GPS, the company behind the Trump dossier, is a “professional defamer.”
According to Browder, Simpson, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, is working with a former Russian counterintelligence officer named Rinat Akhmetshin to destroy the Magnitsky Act, named after Browder’s late lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, and which became law in December 2012.
“Glenn Simpson knowingly spread false information on behalf of individuals connected to the Russian government to try to protect Russian torturers and murderers from consequences,” Browder alleged in a phone interview from his office in London on Friday.
“Glenn Simpson’s work was to knowingly and unscrupulously change the narrative of how Sergei Magnitsky died from murder to natural causes, and change the narrative that Sergei Magnitsky was a criminal rather than a whistleblower,” Browder stated, who serves as CEO of the investment firm Hermitage Capital. [emphasis added]
MAKE SURE TO READ THE REST.
For those unaware, here is a website dedicated to the circumstances surrounding the murder of Sergei Magnitsky. Read this report. Also, visit the extensive OCCRP report on the Magnitsky case here.
This new development removes the remaining layers of Fusion GPS’s already battered credibility and, in my opinion, dispels prior doubts about Fusion GPS’s direct involvement in criminal activities on behalf of its Venezuelan and Russian clients. I was not aware of Fusion GPS’s Kremlin connection, but again, Derwick Associates is also doing phenomenal business with Kremlin-controlled companies.
I guess I will have to disagree with the previous quote from Bill Browder. Fusion GPS is not “professional smear campaigns,” but rather a totally corrupt and amoral group that aids and incites criminals. Simpson’s venture into the private sector has taken a complete turn. The biggest joke of all must be Simpson’s now-removed biography from the International Center for Assessment and Strategy, where he is presented as “Senior Fellow, Corruption and Transnational Crime,” conveniently working for, uh, corrupt transnational criminals. Working for either Democrats or Republicans to produce negative PR is one thing; working for companies like Derwick Associates, something entirely different; but for the biggest thug in the world?
*After this article was published, Tom Catan blocked me on Twitter and blocked his verified account…