The company investigated by Snoop, in the indictment of prosecutors in the file Călin Georgescu
Calin Georgescu presents at the headquarters of the General Prosecutor's Office in Bucharest, May 27, 2025. Inquam Photos / Codrin unic
On Tuesday, September 16, Călin Georgescu was sued with Horațiu Potra and 20 collaborators of the latter. In the file, on context data, information about a company investigated last year also appears by the Snoop.ro website.
This is Anot behind, behind hundreds of publications, influences and advertisements financed with money from Moscow, which propagates misinformation and conspiracy theories in the media landscape in Romania for at least nine years.
The journalist Victor Ilie, a Snoop collaborator and author of the newsletter rights and crooked, wrote last year that the impact on the public is felt in the long term, orienting the vote in the presidential and parliamentary elections to parties and extremist candidates.
Millions of euros for conspiracy
At least two million euros were directed between 2016-2024 by Adenow, a digital advertising company with Kremlin links, to the websites of televisions such as RTV and Realitatea Plus, conspiracy influences and publications with extreme right contents, according to the financial documents obtained by SNOOOop. This is only the amount identified by the Romanian Treasury.
In the chapter “Context” from the indictment of prosecutors from the General Prosecutor's Office, a “pages ecosystem” is described that promoted the rhetoric of Călin Georgescu's posts: messages with spirituality and identity, promoting Romanian traditions and praising ultra-nationalist concepts, an operating mode used with the purpose of propagating Eurosceptic messages.
Prosecutors mention an infrastructure “which has ensured the directors of users to certain Doppelganger sites, which imitated the visual elements of some mainstream publications or state institutions.” This is where Adenow is talking.
“Thus, users were redirected to sites containing Native ADS type advertisements, provided by companies with links in the Russian Federation, respectively Anot, MGID, GeoZO and Adskeeper. Some of the Doppelganger sites were technically assigned as having IPs to the Russian Federation”-extracted from the indictment.
Connections with Russia
Prosecutors say that one of the companies, MGID, “conducted at the level of 2019, surveys on the content preferences in the online environment of users in Romania, the action pattern being similar to that of Anot”, the latter calling it “company signaled internationally in the connection of information in the Russian Federation”.
“Adenow is a company that has been reported internationally as having links with both Russian and Russian government services. It has developed commercial relations with economic agents in the Russian Federation, whose activity was coordinated by a Russian citizen with links in the political environment” – extracted from the indictment
Calin Georgescu will be tried for six crimes, the most serious being complicity in the attempt to commit actions against the constitutional order and the communication of false information, according to HotNews.
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