I’ll resign to save company: Analytica boss

The Cambridge Analytica chief admitted he may have to resign after the company’s role in the 2016 US election was revealed.

Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix says he might resign. Picture: AFP

The chief executive of Cambridge Analytica admitted yesterday he may have to resign, saying the company had been targeted because it had helped President Donald Trump to get into the White House.

Speaking after he was filmed by Britain’s Channel 4 claiming he could entrap clients’ opponents using bribery and “beautiful girls”, Alexander Nix said his future at the British data company was “a decision for the board”.

“If that is going to help the company, that is the right thing to happen. There are 150 young people whose future is on the line. This is profoundly upsetting,” he said.

He said CA, which was accused by a whistleblower of obtaining the Facebook data of 50 million US voters via “personality tests”, was targeted because of its work on the 2016 US presidential election. “Fighting elections is polarising. You win an election for a candidate like Trump and you alienate 100 million people. Therefore by extension of that you are the devil,” he said.

Mr Nix said he was enticed into the Channel 4 interview and that he had never used prostitutes or honey traps: “No, not professionally or personally. I am embarrassed you asked me.”

He added: “I didn’t know what I was walking into and the guy starts saying we need to change the political landscape, I need to entrap the politicians and how can we do this? So I reeled off some examples and said you could do this, you could do that. There’s an English thing about being slightly embarrassed when someone starts going off on one like this and you ­humour him a bit and then you leave.”

Mr Nix was filmed saying CA would offer bribes to smear opponents as corrupt and that it campaigned secretly in elections by operating through front companies or using subcontractors.

In undercover footage, Mr Nix suggested CA could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.

He told a reporter posing as a fixer for a Sri Lankan hoping to get candidates elected: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land, for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the internet.”

Mr Nix said yesterday his company may lose clients. “I certainly think we need to have a damn good inquiry into what’s happened, probably an independent inquiry by a highly credible person so we can say we have undertaken this and publish the facts,” he said.

“It’s going to cost us a vast amount of money, but I think we need to bring in an auditor or legal firm. But for the rest of history and for my children when they become teenagers they will read this stuff about dad getting in hookers to catch out politicians. I mean, I cringe at the idea.”

He has also been accused of lying to Damian Collins, chairman of the British parliament’s digital, culture, media and sport committee, over allegations of harvesting personal data from Facebook users, which he denies: “Everything I said to Damian Collins was absolutely correct.”

He said his company was moral. “We only work for mainstream political parties in free and fair elections, in free and fair democracies and we are proud of the work that we do,” he said.

The Times