Cambridge Analytica announced that it has suspended CEO Alexander Nix on Tuesday, one day after the exec was caught bragging about using bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians on behalf of his clients.
“The Board of Cambridge Analytica has announced today that it has suspended CEO Alexander Nix with immediate effect, pending a full, independent investigation,” the company said in a statement. “In the view of the Board, Mr. Nix’s recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation.”
The board has asked Dr. Alexander Tayler to serve as its acting CEO while the investigation is underway.
On Monday, Channel 4 released a secretly-recorded video of Nix outlining how the firm sways politicians on behalf of its clients.
“We’ll have a wealthy developer come in, somebody posing as a wealthy developer. They will offer a large amount of money to the candidate to finance his campaign in exchange for land, for instance,” Nixon told the reporter. “We’ll have the whole thing recorded on cameras. We’ll blank out the face of our guy and then post it on the Internet.”
When the Channel 4 mole pressed, Nix said that the company could also “send some girls around the candidate’s house,” to serve as sexual entrapment.
Nix’s comments were Cambridge Analytica’s second media fire drill this week, after it was reported by the New York Times the data firm had grabbed the information of 50 million unwitting Facebook users, violating the social network’s terms of service in the process.