Roula Khalaf

Surveillance

Roula Khalaf was selected for surveillance with the Pegasus spyware in 2018. Forbidden Stories was unable to analyze her phone to confirm the infection.

Who is she?

Roula Khalaf is editor of the Financial Times. She started her career at Forbes where she investigated the financial world. In 1995, she joined the Financial Times as a correspondent in North Africa and then the Middle East. Her work in the Middle East won several awards, especially her team’s reporting on the Arab Spring.

In 2013, she won the Foreign Press Association’s Print & Web Feature Story of the Year for a series of investigative pieces on Qatar called “Qatar: From Emirate to Empire”.
She became deputy editor at the Financial Times in 2016 and used this position to push for a better representation of women within the newspaper. She increased the number of expert columns written by women and implemented the use of a software that detects articles that do not quote any woman.

In January 2020, she became the first woman editor of the Financial Times.

Her work

Response

Emirati authorities did not respond to detailed questions sent by Forbidden Stories and its partners. NSO Group did not answer Forbidden Stories’ questions on specific targets but said it “will continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action based on the results of these investigations.”