Replies

ARTICLE

The BBC has found a company registered in London that broadcasts Russian disinformation to an Arabic-speaking audience
https://www.currenttime.tv/a/bbc-kompaniya-propaganda-kremlya/32351818.html

The BBC’s anti-disinformation department has discovered the UK-registered company Yula Group, which broadcasts Russian disinformation to an audience of millions in the Arabic-speaking world.

“Yula Group is the parent company of Yala News. The channel’s journalists, together with disinformation specialists, have been tracking the most popular Yala News videos for a year and found that almost all of them are “native” from Kremlin–controlled or pro-Kremlin sites.

Among them were fake news that the massacre of Bucha residents was staged, that the President of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, was drunk during a video message to the people, that Ukrainian soldiers were fleeing from the front. All of them were reproduced on the Yala News page a few hours after they appeared in Russian state publications.

Belen Carrasco Rodriguez, an employee of the British Center for Information Stability, believes that Yala News is the Kremlin’s mouthpiece in the Middle East. “Yala is popular with the Arab audience, and Kremlin–linked sources can use this to their advantage,” she says.

The Yula Group website is filled mostly with random texts and stock photos, and most of the good reviews look fake because they were written on the same dates by the same users. The company, as the BBC found out, is registered in central London, at an address shared with it by more than 65 thousand firms. Yala Group does not have a real office and staff there.

Geolocation journalists determined that the photos posted on Facebook of Yale employees and office were taken in one of the suburbs of Damascus, many of the employees themselves write in their profile that they are based there.

Experts suggest that Yala registered in the UK in order not to look like a company from a sub-sanctioned country. The director of Yale is a Syrian businessman Ahmad Moema, who lives in Dubai.

“Yala Group is a company based in the UK,– he said. – We have more than 500 clients, including public figures, representatives of the arts and young talents. We don’t have any employees in London yet, but they may appear in the near future.” When asked whether his company received money from the Russian or Syrian authorities, he said that he was “the only source of finance” and “no one can influence me.”