A German publisher has announced a stop to the sale of books authored by a leading journalist and Russia expert after an investigation showed he had received at least €600,000 (£522,000) in undisclosed offshore payments from companies linked to an oligarch close to Vladimir Putin.
Hubert Seipel, an award-winning film-maker and author, admitted receiving support for his work on two books charting the Russian leader’s rise to power and offering portrayals described as sympathetic to him.
The information emerged from the Cyprus Confidential project, based on a cache of 3.6m offshore records leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and Germany’s Paper Trail Media, which shared access with the Guardian and other reporting partners.
Seipel’s publisher Hoffmann und Campe, which is based in Hamburg, confirmed its decision to halt the sale of the books on Wednesday, after the leaking of offshore records that suggested companies linked to the oligarch Alexei Mordashov, a steel and banking magnate placed under sanctions last year for his close ties to the Kremlin, had made payments to the journalist to support the production of two books about the Russian president.
“Hoffmann und Campe Verlag has decided to no longer offer Hubert Seipel’s books for sale due to the published media reports,” a spokesperson said, adding that the publishing house “had no knowledge of the facts described”.
The broadcaster NDR, for whom Seipel produced a documentary in which he was given direct access to Putin for a series of one-to-one interviews, as well as another interview two years later, said it had launched an investigation with an external adjudicator. It said it would shelve the films until further notice and it was considering taking legal action against Seipel.
Approached for comment by the Guardian on Wednesday, Seipel said: “Both NDR and the publisher professionally checked and approved the films and book manuscripts, critics praised the works, and [the publications] Zeit and Spiegel printed excerpts from them, even though neither paper is exactly Putin-friendly. No errors have been found in my books or in my films. The fact that NDR and the publisher are now acting in this way is proof quite simply of the public pressure of the ICIJ campaign.”
In an earlier eight-page response to the Guardian and other media partners, Seipel acknowledged he had received money from Mordashov. He said he wanted it to be known that Mordashov’s support related “exclusively to the book projects” and that he had “at no point received money for films and television interviews from third parties”. He was also keen to stress that he had had editorial independence.
Seipel by his own count has met Putin “nearly 100 times” and interviewed him on multiple occasions, receiving prime-time slots for his broadcasts, including the 2012 documentary. He was a popular commentator on mainstream television after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and even more intensively after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, touted as one of Germany’s top independent experts on Russia and someone with unusually good access to Putin.
The books in question, a 2015 biography called Putin: Inner Views of Power and the 2021 title Putin’s Power: Why Europe Needs Russia, were both written in German and translated into Chinese, Italian, Spanish and other languages.
In response to the Guardian prior to its announcement that it was halting the book sales, Hoffmann und Campe said it had not known about the payments. It said if it was provided with proof that the payments had been made, “we reserve the right to take further action in connection to the books which were contracted, in 2013 and 2016 respectively, by the management at the time based on a TV documentary”.
According to documents seen by the Guardian among the Cyprus files, Seipel and a director of a company linked to Mordashov signed a “deed of sponsorship” in March 2018, in which it was stipulated that he was “writing book [sic] on political environment in the Russian Federation”.
The project’s sponsor, according to the deed, committed to “support the development of this project” and “make this political and historical development available to a wider audience”. Seipel was promised “logistical and organisational support” during his research in Russia, and was under no obligation to pay the money back in case the book was never actually published.
NDR said it had contacted Seipel after being made aware of the sponsorship contracts, and said Seipel had admitted having received the money.
“The broadcaster sees this as a significant conflict of interest that challenges Seipel’s journalistic independence,” a spokesperson for NDR said.
The NDR director general, Joachim Knuth, said: “It is suspected that we, and therefore our audience, have been deliberately misled. We are looking into this now and are considering legal action. We will thoroughly examine the procedures surrounding the commissioning and production of the films.”
• This article was amended on 16 November 2023 to add a response from Hubert Seipel
