Did Putin biographer Seipel receive money from Russia?
German TV journalist Hubert Seipel has not only interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin several times. He has also written a biography about the Kremlin leader. Research now suggests that Russia paid him a large sum of money as part of a sponsorship agreement.
According to media reports, the German TV journalist and Putin biographer Hubert Seipel is said to have received hundreds of thousands of euros from Russia without informing his employer, the broadcaster NDR. As reported by "Der Spiegel" and the ZDF magazine "Frontal", citing confidential documents from Cyprus, 600,000 euros were paid as part of a so-called sponsorship contract.
Seipel's contractual partner was officially a letterbox company called De Vere Worldwide Corporation based in the British Virgin Islands. This apparently belonged to the corporate network of the Russian oligarch and long-standing major TUI shareholder Alexei Mordashov, whom the European Union imposed sanctions on after the start of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. A handwritten note on the contract with Seipel also suggests that there was a similar agreement for a Putin biography back in 2013. This makes Seipel the first renowned Western journalist known to have possibly been paid by Putin's entourage.
Seipel, who interviewed Putin several times for NDR television, admitted "support" from Alexei Mordashov when asked. However, according to Seipel, the now-sanctioned oligarch had no influence on the content of his books. In fact, the contract states that the author has no "obligations to the sponsor in relation to the project (whether in relation to the content or composition of the book or otherwise) or its completion".
Seipel had interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin several times. In 2015, his biography "Putin. Interior Views of Power". This was followed in 2021 by the book "Putin's Power. Why Europe needs Russia". Both books were published by the Hamburg-based publishing house Hoffmann und Campe.
The publisher and NDR declared that they knew nothing about the payments and announced that they would investigate the matter. According to "Spiegel" and ZDF, the payments were uncovered as part of "Cyprus Confidential", an international investigative research project into questionable business dealings in the EU country of Cyprus.
The media reports accuse German TV journalist and Putin biographer Hubert Seipel of receiving hundreds of thousands of euros from Russia without disclosing it to his employer. The payment was allegedly part of a sponsorship agreement with a letterbox company linked to Russian oligarch Alexei Mordashov, who later faced EU sanctions.
Hubert Seipel, the journalist who wrote biographies about Vladimir Putin, claimed that the now-sanctioned oligarch Mordashov provided him with "support," but denied that it influenced the content of his books.
Source: www.ntv.de
