Spies keeping their eyes on spies

Nov. 9 was quite the night at Galvin at Windows, a posh, Michelin-starred restaurant in the Mayfair district of London.

Inside, two private investigators, pretending to be recruiters, were “interviewing” an employee of West Face Capital, a Toronto privateequity firm, over dinner, but allegedly trying to elicit confidential information about West Face.

The investigators were allegedly working for Black Cube, the elite Israeli investigations firm with a specialty in “litigation support” — gathering intelligence that may or may not be useful for lawyers and companies engaged in high-stakes court battles.

But at another table in the tony restaurant were two other spies, these from K2 Intelligence Limited.

They were there spying on the spies, and as the alleged Black Cube agents and the West Face employee left the restaurant, the K2 agents snapped pictures of the two men and the female West Face employee.

West Face was the big winner last year over Catalyst Capital Group in Ontario Superior Court. The two had competed for WIND Mobile, with Catalyst alleging that West Face had used confidential information to successfully acquire a stake in the wireless carrier. Catalyst has claimed it lost out on $750 million in potential profit.

In August of 2016, Judge Frank Newbould, now retired, dismissed the Catalyst action against West Face and Brandon Moyse, the junior analyst who had moved from Catalyst to West Face, taking, Catalyst had alleged, company secrets with him.

It was on Nov. 8-9 that Stella Penn, a former Israeli actress, was publicly named by media outlets in New York and London as an alleged Black Cube operative who had befriended some of the women accusing Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct — a job Black Cube later apologized for taking and pledged to donate its fee to women’s groups.

On a lark, says a source close to West Face, someone in the company’s Bloor Street headquarters in Toronto took a photo of Penn around the office, asking if anyone had ever seen her.

One employee allegedly did, and in short order, broke the bad news — they believed another West Face employee had also been approached by Penn, posing as a recruiter, and was now in London, with a dinner meeting set up for that very night.

It was 4:45 p.m. in London. The dinner was set for 6.

West Face had about an hour to find its own spies and have them scramble to the restaurant.

All of this information, including the photos of the two alleged Black Cube agents, is contained in two hefty volumes of materials filed Nov. 15 at the Ontario Superior Court in Toronto by lawyers for West Face.

It was the firm’s response to Catalyst’s latest court action — a defamation suit against West Face and multiple other companies and individuals it alleges acted in concert, as a “wolfpack,” against Catalyst and a company it controls. West Face has strenuously denied those allegations, and their filings are hardly the usual dry material of such litigation.

Five employees or former employees of West Face swore lengthy affidavits, complete with attachments of emails between them and who they believe were Black Cube agents using various aliases. All but one of the employees are identified by name, but the Post is naming only Moyse and Alexander Singh, the former general counsel for West Face.

The others are junior “back office” employees — they work in accounting.

West Face, which Wednesday said it was appalled by the Black Cube activities, said that transcripts of the surreptitiously taped “interviews” with its employees have been released to the press.

All but one of the targeted employees identified the woman they knew as “Olivia Anderson” or “Maya Lazarov” as the actress Stella Penn.

The actress Rose McGowan, who has accused Weinstein of sexual assault, has said Penn posed as the ostensible women’s activist “Diana Filip.”

Last Saturday, the Post reported that it was also Black Cube, purportedly acting as a sub-contractor to another Israeli firm hired by Catalyst because of a variety of security concerns, which in September ran a sting against the former judge, Newbould.

He was approached by a man posing as a potential client of his arbitration business, and was surreptitiously photographed and recorded at two meetings, one over dinner.

A man authorized to speak for Catalyst said the company didn’t authorize the sting against Newbould, and learned of it only after it happened.

He also said that Black Cube was immediately told “We don’t do that in Canada,” and in a case of “broken telephone,” the agency misunderstood and moved the operation it was running on Singh to London instead. The Catalyst spokesman didn’t acknowledge any other operation against West Face employees.

Black Cube has said its policy “is to never discuss its clients with any third party, and to never confirm or deny any speculation made with regards to the compay’s work.”

Singh’s experience may be the most relevant, at least in court, because in his affidavit, he said that at an Oct. 2 dinner with two men and Maya Lazarov, also at Galvin at Windows, he began to feel under attack. The men were grilling him to disclose confidential information he had about West Face, from his four-year stint there, particularly in relation to the WIND deal.

He fears, he said in the affidavit, that while on the defensive, the tension at the table rising, he was “induced to divulge what may have been privileged information.”

Singh was also told that if he moved on to the next interview stage — it never happened — he would have to take a lie detector test.

There were common elements to all the West Face dealings with alleged Black Cube agents: The purported recruiters were vague about who their clients were and obsessively interested in getting negative information about West Face.

But perhaps the most galling case involved the former junior analyst, Brandon Moyse. Black Cube purportedly made its approach through his artist and art-therapist wife, pretending to represent a global charity working with autistic children.

Moyse, proving himself a smart young man, said he noticed several red flags in the alleged approach and was skeptical but didn’t want to spoil his wife’s excitement.