Earlier this year, two obscure companies from Northern Louisiana brokered a multimillion-dollar deal with former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social and walked away with a finders’ fee valued at $155 million.
The companies—WorldConnect IPTV and JedTec—formed a joint venture, named WorldConnect Technologies, which served as the middleman between Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) and Perception TV CDN, the company hired to build the tech infrastructure needed to power Truth Social’s foray into video streaming.
To better understand the nature of TMTG’s burgeoning media holdings and the companies building it, Fortune examined dozens of business filings from the U.S. and abroad, and spoke to seven sources that previously worked with Perception’s cofounders, its current chair Matjaz “Matt” Vidmar and CEO John Mills.
What emerged from these sources was a “no questions asked” policy at Perception and previous companies connected to Vidmar and Mills that led them to work with Chinese and Russian state-backed propaganda networks, Islamist television channels, and Iranian corporations. TMTG chose to work with Perception despite the fact that in the past it did business with now-sanctioned entities.
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TV channels for Russia, China, and Islamic fundamentalists
Vidmar’s previous company, Vision247, also had a history of working with clients that ran afoul of regulators [...] The company exhibited little discernment regarding who it would work with, striking deals with Russia Today (RT), China Central Television (CCTV), and several Islamist networks.
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RT and CCTV are the state-backed media outlets of Russia and China respectively. Vision247 also carried the broadcast channels of the Islamist media companies Peace TV and Almajd Network. Almajd is an Arabic-language media company that has close ties to the Salafi branch of Islamic fundamentalism. In 2019, Peace TV’s content led to it being banned from broadcasting in the U.K. in 2019 for inciting violence and hate speech. Peace TV was a client of Vision247 at the time it was booted from British airwaves.
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