As you republish news based on the investigations we publish on our news website “Twala”, investigations that our journalists expose themselves to danger in order to accomplish, I wish to remind you that republishing the work of colleagues is subject to ethical rules. The most important one is to attribute these works to their authors out of respect for their efforts. This rule is not always respected by some of the employees of your company. 

This happens a lot through your website “Awras”, which is registered in Algeria under the name of the “Design Com” company belonging to its owner Abdelkader Ben Khaled, a resident of Qatar and employee of “Fadaat” as manager of “Awras”. The latter has made it a habit to republish news based on our investigations which were done as part of an international collaboration, given that our outlet is a partner in these investigations when it comes to their Algerian side. It is best suited to mention “Twala” as a source of the news you republish. We do not republish investigations, we make them. Apart from that, we only publish our partners’ investigations. 

When it comes to the news you republish based on our work, these are investigations made by the journalists of “Twala” which we publish exclusively on the website of our outlet. They were not published anywhere else without our consent, except what your collaborators at “Awras” republish by translating our texts and attributing them to our partners. This is theft, as far as we are concerned. As is the case of the latest article titled “An investigation exposes Raouraoua’s assets in Algeria and sheds light on his professional career”. It is an investigation we made based on leaked data from Crédit Suisse. 

I would like you to inform the employee who published this article to read texts carefully before translating them and republishing them. The investigation belongs to its author Lyas Hallas, not to the newspaper he mentioned without even knowing where it is based. It’s a German newspaper based in Munich, not a Swiss one. 

I would also appreciate it if you informed him that the Algerian “Twala” news outlet is a member of the Consortium that worked on the leaked documents, just like the newspaper mentioned in the “Awras” article. And that there is a difference between a leaked document and the investigation in which it was used. This is not the first time your news outlet republishes our articles while it insists on making these mistakes. If it is a mistake, we would like it corrected. We consider the insistence on making the same mistake to be bad faith. And we would have a different approach in this case. 

Lyas Hallas, director of Twala