THE Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ) has said that Olawale Ayilara, owner of a real estate investment company, Landwey, provided fake information to its service provider Digital Ocean, which has led to the suspension of its website.
This was contained in a report by the FIJ on Tuesday February 28.
According to the FIJ, Landwey’s action was a result of an investigation published by the media outlet, revealing that the real estate organisation received the sum of N42 million from a client and failed to provide the property paid for, 21 months after.
Following the investigation, Landwey had sent emissaries to the FIJ founder Fisayo Soyombo with an appeal to take down the story, which was declined.
However, about 10 months after the investigation, Digital Ocean accused the FIJ of copyright infringements.
The service provider stated that someone had sent an email, claiming ownership of the FIJ’s investigation on Landwey, titled, ’21 Months After Taking N42m, Wale Ayilara’s Landwey Fails to Give UAE-Based Nigerian His Property.’
Digital Ocean identified the claimant as Luis Felipe Colina from Venezuela, who claimed to have published the article in a private newsletter a day before FIJ.
However, the FIJ has described the email as a retaliation by Ayilara over the report published against Landwey.
“FIJ is in possession of evidence showing the email is the handiwork of an international PR firm employed by Ayilara to cleanse his digital footprints of negative comments,” the media organisation reported.
Without conducting investigations, Digital Ocean ordered that the story be brought down and when the FIJ refused, the website was pulled down.
“DigitalOcean did not conduct any investigation, which a basic tool like the Wayback Machine would have done for them. DigitalOcean did not even ask us to prove our ownership of the story. They had just one instruction: take the story down!” FIJ reported.
Describing the newsletter claiming ownership of the story in contention as fake, the FIJ noted that the subscribe button in the newsletter was unresponsive.
“There’s no other piece on that newsletter, and its ‘subscribe’ icon is unresponsive. It is impossible for anyone to subscribe to getting Colina’s past or future newsletters — because they simply do not exist.
“Three, https://iberonewsltd.com, the website on which the newsletter was supposedly hosted, does not exist. Any attempt to reach that website will only yield the following: ‘404. Not Found. The resource requested could not be found on this server!’ How could DigitalOcean have believed a non-existent website had been plagiarised by an existing investigative reporting outlet?” FIJ queried.
The news outlet also noted that Digital Ocean had previous records of pulling down investigations written by journalists.
“In FIJ’s case, DigitalOcean did not only block FIJ’s website, it rejected all our defences of being the original copyright owner. It then went ahead to blacklist FIJ,” the report read.
After blacklisting FIJ’s domain, Digital Ocean gave the organisation 48 hours to remove the domain and its content from the network.
“FIJ’s legal team are currently studying the development in its full scale, and will come up with recommendations within the next 48 hours,” the media organisation stated.
The ICIR reached out to Landwey on its involvement in the issue, through the phone number provided on its website.
The call was received by a man who identified himself as Emmanuel Ero and said he could only respond to enquiries on sales.
“I can forward you an email that you can send your requests to. Chat me on Whatsapp, so that I can send it to you,” Ero said.
However, at the time of filing this report, Ero had not responded to the Whatsapp message sent by The ICIR requesting for the email.
Ijeoma Opara is a journalist with The ICIR. Reach her via [email protected] or @ije_le on Twitter.