LONDON (The Guardian) – A journalist has been awarded more than £80,000 in damages against a London-based investigative website and its CEO – a press freedom campaigner – after claiming she was duped into joining the organization only to find out it was a propaganda vehicle for the UAE and Egypt.
Jane Cahane said she was told in her job interview by Mohamed Fahmy, who was imprisoned in Egypt for more than a year for disseminating “false news” in a case that caused a public outcry, that the Investigative Journal (TIJ) was a publication of independent investigative journalism.
But Cahane, who was editor-in-chief between December 2018 and July 2019, said she believed TIJ received funding from the UAE and pursued an agenda intended to further the interests of the Persian Gulf state and Egypt.
Cahane said Fahmy was “assisted and directed” by representatives or agents of the UAE and, in June 2019, met with the authoritarian Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, under whose regime Fahmy was imprisoned, “to discuss TIJ’s editorial line and content”.
After neither TIJ nor Fahmy presented a defense, a judgment in default, seen by the Guardian, was entered and Cahane was awarded £80,735.92 for fraudulent and/or negligent misrepresentation plus costs.