Explainer: the connections between Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and Cambridge Analytica
Duterte’s defenders have denied any relationship with the controversial consulting firm that exploited the data of millions of Facebook users – this is how the South China Morning Post established those links
What we know so far
La Viña recently said both were ”guests” the day they listened to Nix talk about managing elections using emails, social media and psychographic analysis since Duterte was “weighing a run for the presidency”.
A 2015 news report said Nix, a board director of Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), visited Manila to do “research”. Nix also, according to a recent report, met a lawyer from Duterte’s Davao City named Ray Faizal “Taipan” Ponce Millan – one of the men in the photo.
Millan owns part of a political consulting firm, Istratehiya, which an SCL brochure dated 2013 identified as its Manila office. Istratehiya president Jed Eva recently told online news site Rappler the firm was at that time negotiating a possible partnership with SCL, but this fell through. It had asked SCL to remove the reference.
The fourth man in the photo is Joel Sy Egco, President of the National Press Club then, working now as Undersecretary at the Presidential Strategic Communications Office.
