Black Cube
Black Cube is a private intelligence agency based in London, Tel Aviv, and Madrid. The company was founded in 2010 by former Israeli intelligence officers Dan Zorella and Avi Yanus. Its employees include former members of Israeli intelligence units. In the past, it has supported Israel Defense Forces activities.
Black Cube provides intelligence, evidence, and advisory services in multi-jurisdictional legal and white collar crime cases. Their clients are mainly wealthy individuals, oligarchs, and global corporations. Black Cube represents their clients in court cases, manages public relations, and assists in other matters as needed. The company uncovered high-level corruption in Italy, Panama, and Mexico. It is estimated that Black Cube has managed to recover as much as $5.3 billion of assets for its clients and win $14.7 billion through court verdicts or out-of-court settlements.
Black Cube is criticized for not following ethical rules. Its tactics have resulted in a number of international controversies. In Canada, the firm was criticized by an Ontario Court for an attempt that aimed to discredit a judge by trying to get him to make antisemitic comments in secretly recorded meetings. In Romania, two of its employees were convicted of criminal charges involving harassment and hacking. The firm also drew condemnation for covertly surveilling and assisting efforts to discredit women accusing Harvey Weinstein of sexual violence and the investigative journalists researching whether those accusations were credible.History
BC Strategy Ltd. has offices in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris. It was founded in 2010 by Avi Yanus a former Israel Defense Forces strategic planning officer and Dan Zorella, who was in IDF Military Intelligence. Yanus and Zorella met at the Technion University in Haifa, where they both did undergraduate studies in economics. Yanus went on to complete his PhD in organizational behavior. By 2018, Black Cube had been involved in operations in over sixty countries.
Since 2011, Black Cube has provided evidence for high-profile cases in Canada, Italy, Israel, Mexico, Panama, the United Kingdom and the United States. The company describes itself as a "select group of veterans from the Israeli elite intelligence units that specialises in tailored solutions to complex business and litigation challenges."
Black Cube's International Advisory Board included Meir Dagan, a former chief of Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency, from 2002 to 2011, and Black Cube's president until he died in 2016. Their IAB includes Efraim Halevy, who was also a head of Mossad for 30 years. Other IAB members include Yohanan Danino, Giora Eiland, Adrian Leppard, Asher Tishler, Paul Reyniers, Golan Malka, and Itiel Maayan.
In a court deposition, Yanus described the bilateral relationship between the IDF and Black Cube's civilian market, where former Israeli intelligence operators advise Black Cube and provide it with a business network. According to Forbes Israel, Black Cube is one of many business intelligence firms such as GPW, and K2, for an industry that expanded to 80 billion dollars in 2015 alone. These intelligence firms attract people who previously worked in IDF Military Intelligence. Salaries are high in the business intelligence sector. Dozens of these firms were established as the demand grew. Forbes Israel called this a "new trend in Israeli exports." Black Cube has said it recruits from Israeli intelligence because they ‘know how to look for the weak points,’ and hires operatives who were born outside of Israel because of their ease in assuming false identities and speaking foreign languages. They are, between them, fluent in more than 30 languages.Media coverage
In 2014, Israel's Globes published a favorable article about Black Cube after they won several high-profile cases. In their 2018 article, Forbes Israel called Black Cube the "Mossad" of the "business world".
Black Cube has been criticized by the international press. In his November 6, 2017 The New Yorker article, Ronan Farrow described them as an "army of spies" who attempted to stifle stories about Harvey Weinstein's sexual assaults by seeking to discredit the women Weinstein attacked and the journalists who investigated his crimes. A lengthy June 2021 report in the Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail—one in a series of articles that were highly critical of its methods—detailed the many ways Black Cube agents worked to fabricate evidence against innocent civilians, including a Canadian judge and journalists. In August 2021, the podcast Darknet Diaries featured a first-hand account of Black Cube operatives targeting journalists and Citizen Lab staff member John Scott-Railton. In his 2021 publication, Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies, former investigative reporter with The New York Times, Barry Meier, described the "oversized impact" Black Cube and other private spies in their "murky world"—were "suddenly having on politics, business and our personal lives."Notable investigations and clients
The first case that brought Black Cube to the attention of the media was the legal dispute between Vincent Tchenguiz, a major donor to the Conservative Party and an investor in the SCL Group and the UK Serious Fraud Office. Tchenguiz first hired Black Cube in 2011, following his arrest on March 10, 2011, as part of the SFO investigation into the collapse of the Icelandic bank Kaupthing. and continued to use their services on a number of cases. Black Cube analysed the network of relationships surrounding the collapse of the bank, and helped build a successful challenge to the SFO arrests and search warrants, causing the judge to declare the SFO's actions unlawful in 2013. Tchenguiz's lawsuit against Black Cube, alleging fraudulent invoices, was dropped in an undisclosed settlement agreement.In 2014, Black Cube was hired by Israeli businessman Nochi Dankner, to examine a court decision assigning control of IDB Holding Corp. Ltd. to Motti Ben Moshe. Black Cube investigated the sources of capital of Ben Moshe, revealing an ongoing investigation by German regulatory authorities into Ben Moshe's company ExtraEnergy, and locating a witness who held evidence of money laundering and tax evasion by Ben Moshe.In 2019, the Israeli investigative television program Uvda released a report detailing how Dan Zorella had met with then-president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Joseph Kabila in 2015 to hire Black Cube for Operation Coltan, an operation to spy on Kabila's political opponents. Black Cube investigators rented out the entire floor of a hotel in Kinshasa to serve as a base of operations. Opposition figures expressed outrage at the revelations.In 2015, Black Cube assisted Taiwanese businessman Nobu Su, owner of the shipping company TMT, in his efforts to gain permission to appeal a 2014 judgement in favor of Lakatamia Shipping in which Su was found personally liable for the amount of almost $47m. Black Cube delivered intelligence to Su's legal team showing that 20% of the judgement amount was due to a company called Slagen Shipping, which had ceased operations at the time of the establishment of the claim, thereby rendering it unable to act as a claimant, both reducing the quantum of the judgement significantly, and causing the appeal to be granted.Black Cube was hired to assist Kfar Giladi Quarries in their highly publicized dispute with Caesarstone in Israel. Black Cube engaged a Caesarstone engineer in conversation during a group bicycle trip in Kfar Giladi. In the recording, the engineer contradicted the allegations that were made by Caesarstone in the arbitration proceeding with Kfar Giladi. After six years of deliberations, Judge Boaz Okun ordered Caesarstone to pay more than $14m as compensation to Kfar Giladi.In 2016, Black Cube was involved in exposing bribery and corruption in a set of Italian arbitrations between AmTrust and an Italian named Antonio Somma totaling €2bn. Somma admitted to the company's undercover agents that he could control the arbitration panels, and that he had an agreement to pay the chair of the arbitration panel 10% of any money they awarded him. Following Black Cube's findings, the arbitrator was dismissed and in July 2016, the two sides reached a settlement on the total of 60 million euros instead of the initial 2 billion euro claim.Rami Levy Hashikma Marketing
In 2016, Black Cube was hired by Rami Levy, the owner of Rami Levy Chain Stores Hashikma Marketing who is considered a champion of low prices in Israel, to verify his suspicions that he was being targeted by a rival chain in a negative media campaign. Black Cube provided Levy with evidence that the PR agent who worked for Levy's competitor, Victory supermarket chain, exposed the negative campaign that they carried out aimed at damaging Levy's public reputation. Levy later used those materials in a lawsuit against his competitor.In 2016, France's Alstom and its Israeli partner Afcon hired Black Cube to assist them with their dispute against the Israel Railways' electrification bid, which the Spanish company SEMI won. Black Cube presented recordings of officials from the Israel Railway discussing malfunctions that occurred in the bid. Based on these findings in January 2018, the Superior Court in Israel issued an agreement of compromise according to which the work on the railway will be divided between all three of the companies and that Black Cube's clients' work will be priced at 580 million NIS, after they originally lost the bid.Harvey Weinstein
In 2017, Black Cube made headlines after it was revealed that in 2016 the film executive Harvey Weinstein had hired private investigators—including Kroll and Black Cube—with its highly trained "former Mossad agents"— in his efforts to suppress allegations by numerous women that he had sexually harassed or assaulted them. Weinstein was referred to the company by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who denied any personal connection with the company or its associates. In his July 2016 contract with Black Cube, Weinstein clarified that the explicit goal of the investigation was to stop the abuse allegations from surfacing. In his November 6, 2017 The New Yorker article, entitled "Harvey Weinstein’s Army of Spies", Ronan Farrow described in detail how Black Cube agents tracked and met journalists and actresses. They focused in particular on Rose McGowan, who later publicly accused Weinstein of rape. Over the course of a year, Black Cube and other agencies, "target, or collect information on, dozens of individuals, and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focused on their personal or sexual histories." One agent, Stella Penn Pechanac, used an alias to pose as a women's rights supporter interested in hiring McGowan for a formal dinner speech, enabling her to secretly record conversations with the actress. Black Cube apologized for taking the case in November 2017., Manhattan federal prosecutors investigating Weinstein were probing into the firm's activities on his behalf, and McGowan's separate racketeering suit against it remained active. During Weinstein's 2020 trial for assault in Manhattan, Black Cube's spying on behalf of Weinstein was entered into evidence in January. By 2021, McGowan’s case had been dismissed by a federal judge, and federal prosecutors ultimately took no action against Black Cube. In the wake of the public fallout from the case, Black Cube changed its vetting procedure for prospective clients, introduced a more robust KYC system, and instituted a policy of reviewing potentially risky clients with its Board of Directors.