The journalist and author Hubert Seipel is said to have received hundreds of thousands of euros from Russia – as “sponsorship money”. Seipel was best known for his Putin interviews and Russia reporting.
According to media reports, the German television journalist and Putin biographer Hubert Seipel is said to have received hundreds of thousands of euros from Russia without informing his employers. As the “Spiegel” and the ZDF magazine “Frontal” reported, citing confidential documents from Cyprus, it is about 600,000 euros that were paid as part of a so-called sponsorship contract.
payment via Letterbox company
Seipel’s contractual partner was officially a shell company called De Vere Worldwide Corporation based in the British Virgin Islands. This apparently belongs to the corporate network of the Russian oligarch and long-time major TUI shareholder Alexei Mordashov. The oligarch was sanctioned by the European Union after the start of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
According to “Spiegel”, the sponsorship agreement from 2018 concerns a book project “about the political environment in the Russian Federation, which is to be published in 2019”. There is also evidence that a similar agreement had already existed years before, it said.
Seipel had interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin several times. His biography “Putin. Inside Views of Power” was published in 2015. The book “Putin’s Power. Why Europe Needs Russia” followed in 2021. Both books were published by the Hamburg publishing house Hoffmann and Campe.
The publisher assured that it had no knowledge of the payments and announced that it would investigate the events. Hoffmann and Campe also explained that based on the current reporting, they had decided “to no longer offer their books for sale.”
NDR is examining legal steps
For the NDR Seipel realized, among other things, “I, Putin – A Portrait” (2012) and the interviews with Edward Snowden and Vladimir Putin in Moscow (2014). The journalist has since admitted to the broadcaster that he had received money from Alexey Mordashov through two “sponsorship contracts” in 2013 and 2018 and explained that it was for two book projects.
The broadcaster sees this as a significant conflict of interest that casts doubt on Seipel’s journalistic independence. Seipel would have the production company and the degree NDR have to disclose to. The author was last for the in 2019 NDR employed.
Films are reviewed externally
“There is a suspicion that we, and therefore also our audience, were intentionally deceived. We are now investigating this and are considering legal action,” explained NDR-Intendant Joachim Knuth. “The processes surrounding the commissioning and implementation of the films that Hubert Seipel made for him NDR realized, we will check thoroughly. We were able to recruit the former ‘Spiegel’ editor-in-chief Steffen Klusmann for this purpose.”
According to “Spiegel” and ZDF, the payments were uncovered as part of “Cyprus Confidential”, an international investigative investigation into questionable transactions in the EU country Cyprus.