After a carousel of intricate business decisions and corporate mumbo jumbo that followed the 2018 scandal, two companies emerged from Cambridge Analytica: Emerdata Limited and Dynamo Recoveries Limited.
According to recent data from the UK Government's Companies House and international media outlets, these two companies are active with a similar business structure as their ill-fated parent.
Cambridge Analytica was involved in one of the biggest data mining scandals in 2018 when the company was found to have harvested data from more than 87 million Facebook users for political campaign purposes. The owners are trying to go under the radar to continue the same business model and avoid paying fines or settlements.
The scandal erupted in March 2018. The Observer reported that Cambridge Analytica, a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, had collected personal data of at least 50 million Americans and at least a million Britons. A whistleblower said that Cambridge Analytica used the data to influence the outcome of the US presidential election and the Brexit referendum, both in 2016. The data was fed into a software program that profiles voters and targets them with personalized political advertisements. Thus, the program can predict and influence choices at the ballot box.
Britain's Channel 4 News broadcast secret recordings in which the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, can be heard claiming credit for the election of Donald Trump. He told an undercover reporter: "We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting. We ran all the digital campaign the television campaign, and our data informed all the strategy."
Cambridge Analytica denied any wrongdoing but said the negative media coverage left it with no clients and mounting legal fees. The company announced it would close and start insolvency proceedings with SCL Elections Ltd, the UK entity affiliated with Cambridge Analytica.
At the beginning of May 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported that Cambridge Analytica started insolvency proceedings in the US and UK. Also, the Business Insider reported that Rebekah and Jennifer Mercer, daughters of Robert Mercer, had joined the board of" a mysterious new company set up by executives at scandal-hit political research firm Cambridge Analytica."
According to public filings at Britain's Companies House, Emerdata was incorporated in August 2017, when Cambridge Analytica had already been the focus of investigative media, and the Mercers were appointed to its board in March 2018. Alexander Nix was also listed as a director, as was Julian Wheatland, chairman of Cambridge Analytica's parent firm SCL Group. The filings showed Wheatland set up Emerdata along with Cambridge Analytica's chief data officer, Alexander Tayler. The company was listed under "data processing, hosting, and related activities." Another notable company director was Johnson Chun Shun Ko, the deputy chairman of Frontier Services Group, a private security firm chaired by US businessman and prominent Trump supporter Erik Prince at that time.
An analysis published by The Guardian stated that Cambridge Analytica and SCL had at least 18 active companies, branches, and affiliates with similar names based in the UK and the US." The complex relationship among these companies makes it difficult to understand how revenues, employment, and data are shared. According to the analysis, " it almost seems as though the business structure was created to make it impossible to track decision-making and funding."
Also, in May 2018, a New York Times story confirmed that Emerdata was created to become the new Cambridge Analytica." Cambridge and SCL officials privately raised the possibility that Emerdata could be used for a Blackwater-style rebranding of Cambridge Analytica and the SCL Group, according to two people with knowledge of the companies who asked for anonymity to describe confidential conversations. One plan under consideration was to sell off the combined company's data and intellectual property", said the US newspaper.
After announcing its shutdown, Cambridge Analytica was shortly acquired by Emerdata Limited. Also, Emerdata acquired most of the SCL companies before their bankruptcies to bring them under a single ownership structure to refinance them. Since purchasing the now-defunct firm, Emerdata has bankrolled the SCL companies' legal bills amid investigations and multi-billion dollar lawsuits on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite owning most of the companies' assets, Emerdata issued several press releases indicating that the holding company did not possess sensitive data.
In December 2019, US regulators found that Cambridge Analytica deceived consumers about collecting Facebook Inc. data for voter profiling and targeting. They also engaged in deceptive practices relating to its participation in the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework - a pact on the cross-border transfer of personal data. In July 2019, Facebook agreed to pay the Federal Trade Commission a record-breaking $5 billion fine to resolve a government probe into its privacy practices. Meta (ex-Facebook) investors want to make up for their losses.
In September 2020, the UK's Insolvency Service banned Alexander Nix from running limited liability companies in Britain for seven years for letting staff offer "unethical services." Alexander Nix was the director of Cambridge Analytica and five linked companies that had marketed themselves as offering clients "bribery or honey trap stings" and "voter disengagement campaigns," the Service said. Nix told Reuters at the time that he had not admitted any wrongdoing and had not been accused of breaking any laws but had decided to accept the disqualification to bring the matter to a close and to "avoid an unnecessary, lengthy, and expensive court case." The Insolvency Service said it had started investigating the directors' conduct after the companies went into compulsory liquidation. "Our conclusions were clear that SCL Elections had repeatedly offered shady political services to potential clients over a number of years," Mark Bruce, the Insolvency Service's chief investigator, said in a statement. The agency found that Nix "had caused or permitted SCL Elections or associated companies to act with a lack of commercial probity."
An investigation published in June 2022 by NewsTRACS found that the companies that have emerged and SCL Group are Emerdata Limited and Dynamo Recoveries Limited. NewsTRACS published a chart with the links between the entities.
Source: newstracs.com
"The directors of Emerdata Limited and Dynamo Recoveries are identical and include Rebekah and Jennifer Mercer as well as Jacquelyn James-Varga, who is a partner in an accounting firm and who is involved in several Mercer family foundations, PACs, and other entities," according to the investigation.
The data available in September 2023 from the UK's Companies House confirm that things are going in the same direction. Rebekah, Jennifer Mercer, Jacquelyn James-Varga, and Gary Ka Chun Tiu appear in both management structures.
The repercussions of the Cambridge Analytica scandal are of huge public interest for at least two reasons: the reality of ongoing court cases regarding the breach of personal data, with billions of dollars in claims, and the possibility of having another momentous election with a result decided through coercion, manipulation and unethical strategic targeting.
