Earlier this summer, French company Avisa Partners, self-described as specialised in “economic intelligence, international affairs and cybersecurity”, was the subject of numerous media reports, including by Mediapart, on its alleged manipulation of information published in participative blogs and on the pages of online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
But further questions are now raised over its activities after the company, whose clients include corporations listed on France's CAC 40 stock exchange as well as foreign dictatorships, confirmed information gathered by Mediapart that it had, at the behest of an unidentified client, carried out enquiries into France-based Bulgarian journalist Atanas Chobanov, whose investigations into corruption, centred on Bulgaria, have been met with a campaign of intimidation, including physical threats.
In the spring of 2020, teams employed by Avisa Partners carried out research on Chobanov, including various aspects of his personal and professional lives. A former political refugee and an IT specialist by training, Chobanov works as an engineer with France’s national centre for scientific research, the CNRS, while also editing Bivol.bg, an independent investigative website which he co-founded several years ago. It has published numerous reports on corruption, notably concerning the misappropriation of European Union funds and links between Bulgarian political leaders and organised crime.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Questioned by Mediapart, Avisa Partners, which proudly claims it works with public institutions such as France's armed forces ministry, the gendarmerie and Interpol, confirmed “after internal enquiries” that it had indeed carried out research on Atanas Chobanov, but played down the extent of its enquiries.
According to the company, the operation began at the request of a “press relations agency”, whom it did not name, with the “aim of discovering who was behind the attacks to which its client had been subjected”. The name of that “client” was also not provided.
The company said that it then collated details about Chobanov but that these all came from “known information” that had been “published online, sent by the prospective client or had been obtained by consulting international economic and legal databases that are open to everyone”. It said an “internal analysis report” was written which was “not distributed outside of Avisa”.
It added that it was after that preliminary research that it ultimately decided not to pursue the matter any further. “[The report] gave us a sufficiently complete understanding of the situation so as not to pursue any [further] commercial requests linked to Mr Chobanov,” explained Arnaud Dassier, the firm's co-director (see his full response, in French, to Mediapart’s questions in this annex).
For several years Chobanov has been the victim of threats and intimidation that have been publicly denounced by international NGOs, including Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
In 2019, Bivol’s investigations into what was called the “Apartmentgate” scandal showed how figures close to the Bulgarian government had bought luxury properties at below-market prices, leading four ministers to resign. Bivol was also behind investigations concerning the secret activities of Delyan Peevski, who French daily Le Monde described as the “most powerful and most hated oligarch in Bulgaria”.
“Our investigations contributed to awareness about corruption but we're still waiting for a crackdown in Bulgaria,” Atanas Chobanov told French daily La Croix in February 2022. Meanwhile these revelations also provoked deep hostility towards the journalist, who regularly comes under fire from those in Bulgaria who have benefited from government patronage.
In early 2020 a new volley of revelations by Bivol – in particular about suspicions of assets being concealed in Spain that implicated people close to the prime minister at the time, Boyko Borisov – caused a stir in Bulgaria, and Chobanov again faced personal attacks, which prompted Reporters Without Borders (RSF) to take a public stand in his defence. “It is distressing to see that personal and offensive attacks against journalists by the most senior officials in Bulgaria are not isolated and keep on occurring,” said Pauline Adès-Mevel, the head of RSF’s EU and Balkans desk in a public statement issued on February 13th 2020.
However, the alarm sounded by RSF clearly did not deter Avisa Partners' from carrying out their research into Atanas Chobanov less than two months later. The information that was gathered focussed on his “activities”, his “income sources”, his home address and his journalistic “relationships”.
Questioned by Mediapart, Avisa Partners disputed any suggestion that the operation, which culminated in a written report, was aimed at collecting compromising personal information that could have been used against Chobanov or which could have identified potential sources for the journalist in his investigations. “We have not compromised the confidentiality of any journalistic source,” said Arnaud Dassier.
The French company, which is well established in Bulgaria, declined to give the name of the client which commissioned its investigations – which it said were finally abandoned after producing that internal report.
Meanwhile, Mediapart has learnt of potential links between Avisa Partners and a fake blogger who on March 3rd 2016 published a blog in Mediapart's participative Club section that sought to tarnish Chobanov's reputation. Questioned by Mediapart, Avisa Partners said it had had nothing to do with the blogger in question, and was in no way connected with this smear campaign.
Using the pretence of being interested in how the CNRS worked, the blog, written by an anonymous contributor under the name 'André Jalon', suggested the Bulgarian might be employed bogusly at the research centre. The blogger wrote: “Is it the CNRS's role to fund the political activism of foreign researchers at the taxpayer’s expense?”
Rapidly removed from publication by Mediapart, the blog had no impact in France. However, despite its low visibility it was, surprisingly, spotted and cited on June 6th 2018 by Trud, one of Bulagria’s leading daily newspapers and close to the authorities there. That report is still online and the information in it is presented as coming from the “popular website Mediapart”.
The account under the name 'André Jalon', set up on Mediapart on March 3rd 2016 to publish the blog attacking Chobanov, shared characteristics with other blogger profiles which were used by Avisa Partners to infiltrate the Mediapart Club and which have since been deleted. “We didn't carry out an operation in 2016 on this subject [editor's note, Atanas Chobanov],” said Arnaud Dassier, who added that “it would show bad faith to make your readers believe that Avisa might be behind every Club blog”.
A disturbing alert from the US embassy in Sofia
Over the years the journalist and his family have learnt to live with such destabilisation campaigns. “Atanas Chobanov, who has exposed the biggest scandals in recent years, and his colleagues at the investigative news website Bivol, have been targeted by constant harassment, including threats, murder attempts, surveillance, phone-tapping, tax inspections, judicial pressures and investigations of their property,” said Reporters Without Borders in another press release in July 2020.
On January 10th 2022, the journalist registered a main courante – a statement that is less formal than a legal complaint but which serves as a document of record – at a police station in the south-west Paris suburb of Clamart. The aim was to inform French police that three days earlier, at “around 11.05 am”, he had received a call from the United States Embassy in Sofia, who warned him of an “imminent threat” against him.
Under what is known as a 'duty to warn', intelligence agencies in the US are legally obliged to warn any individual of a plan to murder or kidnap them about which the agency has been informed.
“I assume that this threat is linked to my work as an investigative journalist,” wrote Atanas Chobanov in the statement he handed to the police, adding that that he had also alerted Reporters Without Borders and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), the consortium of journalists with whom he works.
In October 2015, while he was abroad, a team from the Bulgarian television channel Kanal 3, then owned by the oligarch Delyan Peevski, arrived without warning at the journalist's home in France to interview family members. The crew also filmed the scene without their knowledge. Once again, Reporters Without Borders publicly condemned this. In September the following year the Bulgarian journalist, appearing in a live discussion programme broadcast by Mediapart, spoke of the pressures he faced (see an extract, in French, below).
When Chobanov prepared to travel to work at the CNRS on December 12th 2016, he found a large blue wolf cuddly toy on the bonnet of his car, which was parked in front of his house, as later reported by French weekly news magazine L'Obs.
On September 20th 2018 Reporters Without Borders wrote to the chief of the Paris police, Michel Dulpuech, to make him aware of “serious threats” that Chobanov said he had been informed of the week before, and which apparently came from a “Bulgarian industrialist”. The NGO wrote: “In view of the risks that Mr Chobanov runs as a result of his professional activity, we ask you that all precautions are taken to guarantee his safety in France.”
On November 17th, 2019, Chobanov discovered a hat with a skull and crossbones motif attached to his car's wing mirror. In what appeared to be another incident of intimidation, on February 25th 2020, he noticed a hat on his car bonnet. While it appeared innocent enough, it was made by a Bulgarian firm. Shortly afterwards, Avisa Partners were to begin their enquiries into the journalist.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter (editing by Graham Tearse)