The firm had announced early May that it would close down and file for insolvency in Britain and US, after failing to recover from a massive data-harvesting scandal
The building that houses the Cambridge Analytica office in London. (Photo: AFP)
British marketing analytics firm Cambridge Analytica has filed for voluntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the Southern District of New York, court filings showed.
The firm, whose attorney filed for bankruptcy on 17 May, had announced earlier in the month it would close and file for insolvency in Britain and the United States after failing to recover from a massive data-harvesting scandal involving Facebook users.
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Cambridge Analytica had announced on 2 May that it along with SCL Elections Ltd, the elections division of Cambridge’s British affiliate SCL Group, was immediately ceasing all operations and had filed applications to commence insolvency proceedings in the UK.
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READ | Cambridge Analytica shuts down, to file for bankruptcy
The alleged misuse of data by CA, which worked with Donald Trump’s team ahead of the US Presidential election and also the winning Brexit campaign, compromised personal information of up to 87 million Facebook users.
In a statement posted on its website earlier, Cambridge Analytica had said the “siege of media coverage” had driven away all of its customers and suppliers.
It however reiterated that the allegations and accusations levelled against it over the past several months were unfounded. Despite its efforts to correct the record, the company said, it had been “vilified for activities that are not only legal, but also widely accepted as a standard component of online advertising in both the political and commercial arenas”.
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Stating that its employees would be losing their jobs due to the “damage caused to the business by the unfairly negative media coverage”, Cambridge Analytica had said in its statement it intended to fully meet its obligations towards them despite the company’s “precarious financial condition”.
With regulators and lawmakers opening investigations against Cambridge Analytica, Facebook too faced heat and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to testify before the US Congress last month over data privacy concerns.
(With agency inputs)
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