Evidence of meeting #113 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was know.
A video is available from Parliament.
June 12th, 2018 / 9:35 a.m.
Liberal
Michel Picard Liberal Montarville, QC
Thank you.
Sir, what are the names of the Russian clients, or what kind of service do you provide to Russian clients?
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
Michel Picard Liberal Montarville, QC
Why do you have a page of codes translated into Russian, then?
9:35 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
I don't know. Mr. Erskine-Smith mentioned that earlier. I have not seen any code in our repository that has Russian, but it's possible we've downloaded code samples that might have included stuff, but I don't know. I would have to look into it. If you have specific information that I can look into, I'm happy to do that.
9:35 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
Johnny-Five is our— Oh, I think I might know what you're thinking about.
Johnny-Five is an app, an iPhone and android app that we have made for one of our clients. The client is WPA Intelligence out of the United States. It in turn has sold that to its clients. That's how we arranged that. One of their—
9:35 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
It's WPA Intelligence, out of the United States.
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
Michel Picard Liberal Montarville, QC
Do you know whether it's an American company, or just an American...?
9:40 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
Yes. It in turn has sold access to that app to its clients. One of those clients is in Ukraine. We did some translation work for them that included English, Russian, and Ukrainian, to make the app work in Ukraine.
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
Michel Picard Liberal Montarville, QC
Do you happen to be aware of who are the clients of your client?
9:40 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
We're not always aware of all the other clients of our client—only if we're working with them with respect to that specific client.
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
Michel Picard Liberal Montarville, QC
You knew what the purpose was of this app of the Ukrainian client at the end, did you?
9:40 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
Yes. That particular app is for sharing social messages with other people; it's for joining campaign activities, seeing what the campaign is up to, making phone calls, and this sort of thing.
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
Michel Picard Liberal Montarville, QC
I want to follow up on one question Mr. Erskine-Smith asked about the £600,000 that was agreed upon verbally. This was for a specific campaign. Which one?
9:40 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
We're speaking about BeLeave, I think.
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
Michel Picard Liberal Montarville, QC
Okay. I guess if this money was for a specific campaign, and you say this money was agreed upon verbally, how did they justify their expenses then? What kind of document did you provide for them to justify their expense for political reasons?
9:40 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
For that particular discussion, Mr. Grimes emailed us. Mr. Massingham and Mr. Grimes then had the conversation about what their goals were and what they wanted to do. Then all of the decisions on what ads were run, and everything, was done via the Slack channel that I provided you and also verbally on the phone.
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
Michel Picard Liberal Montarville, QC
What kind of invoice did you provide them, because they need to justify the expense?
9:40 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
We provided them insertion orders and invoices that I believe have been made public by the Electoral Commission in the U.K.
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
Michel Picard Liberal Montarville, QC
I would like a copy of this invoice, please, with a description of—