Seipel ist so 1 Pimmel
Jau
I don't understand why this guy can be considered a "top journalist" when he has written several panegyrical books about Putin. That there should be enough to undermine all credit this guy has.
He is called a "top German journalist" because writing bad stories about Germany sells and so he must be made important to make this a good story. In Germany he's actually one of the top (and few) journalists concerning stories about Russia and that's it... one obviously often criticised for his work and doing very litte else than covering Russia for quite some time.
Once upon a time (so up to 20 years ago) he however won some awards for documentaries, the last one being for the world-first tv interview with Snowden in Russia in 2014. (Also back then he was already asked about getting money from Russia for more favorable reporting -and denied it- so a decade ago people already knew what his "reporting" is actually worth.)
i dont consider the fact that he wrote books on Putin with a different take as the problem to him being a "top journalist". Germany suffers a lot from manufacturing consent and default attacks on credibility are a part of the problem.
It is more the fact that aside from interviewing and writing on Putin he hardly has any relevancy. I would expect a top journalist to be generally known and continually relevant.
panegyrical
New word acquired, ty.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A leading western journalist who has long been considered one of Germany’s top independent experts on Russia received at least €600,000 (£522,000) in undisclosed offshore payments from companies linked to an oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, leaked files have revealed.
Hubert Seipel, an award-winning film-maker and author, was paid money in instalments, which documents suggest was to support his work on two books he wrote that chart Putin’s rise to power and offer portrayals described by many as sympathetic to the Russian president.
The revelations are likely to reverberate across Germany, where debate has been raging since last year’s invasion of Ukraine over the role parts of the political and business elite played in helping to keep Putin in power, not least due to its long-term dependence of Europe’s largest economy on Russian oil and gas.
One of the few journalists anywhere to have had direct and regular contact with the Russian leader, Seipel, who by his own admission has met Putin “nearly 100 times”, has acknowledged receiving money from accounts linked to the oligarch Alexei Mordashov, a steel and banking magnate placed under sanctions last year for his close ties to the Kremlin.
The information has emerged from the Cyprus Confidential project – a cache of 3.6m offshore records leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and Germany’s Paper Trail Media, which shared access with the Guardian and other reporting partners.
The Cyprus files include an agreement titled “Deed of Sponsorship”, signed in March 2018 by Seipel and by a director of a British Virgin Islands (BVI)-registered company called De Vere Worldwide Corp, and a further witness.
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How would journalists be able to uncover this, nevermind getting their hands on the actual contract? It's so odd
The journalists got leaked documents from a Cyprus based company owned by a Russian oligarch. Since he owned a large share of the German travel company Tui they looked into it. Initially the big thing was that PwC seemd to help Russian oligarchs in sanction busting, which currently caused an investigation into it by the Cyprian authorities. However in those documents seems to have been this contract as well.
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