Spokesman says company had no ‘commercial contracts’ in Australia, despite having a local business name
Cambridge Analytica has said it holds no data on Australian
individuals and has no local business contracts, despite setting up an
Australian entity in 2015 and meeting with prospective clients including members of the Liberal party.
The company’s tactics attracted worldwide attention after news broke that it had unauthorised access to tens of millions of Facebook profiles, harvested through users of an app and the friends of those users.
On Tuesday Guardian Australia revealed the business name Cambridge Analytica had been deregistered in Australia the previous night.
“Cambridge Analytica and affiliated companies do not hold any data on Australian residents, nor do they have contractual relationships with any Australian clients,” a company spokesman told Guardian Australia on Wednesday night.
The spokesman said Cambridge Analytica had “not executed any client work in Australia nor entered into any contracts of any type” in Australia.
Asked if this included employment contracts for its Australian executive, the spokesman clarified the company had no “commercial contracts”.
The spokesperson did not answer further questions.
An Australian website was set up under the business name of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group. The holder of the Cambridge Analytica business name in Australia, Allan Lorraine, was listed as a director on that website, but said he “never was” its director.
Lorraine could not explain the existence of the website except to suggest the company had wanted to appear bigger in Australia than they were.
He confirmed the Cambridge Analytica business name – which he registered without the global company’s permission – and the SCL Group Australia website were connected.
The company’s tactics attracted worldwide attention after news broke that it had unauthorised access to tens of millions of Facebook profiles, harvested through users of an app and the friends of those users.
On Tuesday Guardian Australia revealed the business name Cambridge Analytica had been deregistered in Australia the previous night.
“Cambridge Analytica and affiliated companies do not hold any data on Australian residents, nor do they have contractual relationships with any Australian clients,” a company spokesman told Guardian Australia on Wednesday night.
The spokesman said Cambridge Analytica had “not executed any client work in Australia nor entered into any contracts of any type” in Australia.
Asked if this included employment contracts for its Australian executive, the spokesman clarified the company had no “commercial contracts”.
The spokesperson did not answer further questions.
An Australian website was set up under the business name of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group. The holder of the Cambridge Analytica business name in Australia, Allan Lorraine, was listed as a director on that website, but said he “never was” its director.
Lorraine could not explain the existence of the website except to suggest the company had wanted to appear bigger in Australia than they were.
He confirmed the Cambridge Analytica business name – which he registered without the global company’s permission – and the SCL Group Australia website were connected.
The website, which sat on SCL Group’s global domain but carried no phone number or street address for the Australian office, has since been taken down.
In the Australian corporate registry, the Australian Cambridge Analytica business name was held by the trustee for the Lorraine Family Trust, and its address was that of Lorraine’s home in the Sydney surburb of Maroubra.
The SCL Group Australia website carries only a post office address, also in Maroubra.
The global page lists offices in a number of countries with several addresses matching those of Cambridge Analytica’s international offices.
Inquiries by Guardian Australia to SCL Group about its Australian operation were directed to Cambridge Analytica.
On Thursday Lorraine said there was “no such thing as employment contracts as I was only ever going to be a referral partner”. He said had no knowledge of any other work the company might have conducted.
Lorraine had earlier told Guardian Australia he registered the Cambridge Analytica business name “in anticipation of doing business with them” after discussing the potential with company representatives.
He said both parties got busy with other things – Lorraine with his car-sales consulting business and Cambridge Analytica with the Trump election campaign – and nothing ever came of it.
Lorraine said he had “forgotten about it until now” and deregistered the company name on Monday following inquiries from media. He had contacted Cambridge Analytica and the company’s global business development manager, Peter Jones, but had not heard back.
In a secretly filmed video by Channel 4 News, Cambridge Analytica’s chief data officer, Dr Alex Tayler, and the managing director of the firm’s global political arm, Mark Turnbull, told a journalist who was posing as a prospective client that the company had set up in Australia.
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