Belga

Founded by engineer Maurice Travailleur with the key involvement of journalist Pierre-Marie Olivier, King Albert I of Belgium, and the king's secretary M. L. Gérard on August 20, 1920, the Société Anonyme Agence Télégraphique Belge (lit. 'Belgian Telegraphic Agency S. A.'; abbreviated to Belga) was established to position Belgium in the international information process after World War I, when its policy of obligatory neutrality had ended. The starting capital amounted to five million francs, almost entirely provided by industrial and banking companies. The agency began functioning on January 1 the next year, with Travailleur serving as the first president of its board of directors. During the Nazi German occupation of Belgium, Belga was shut down, its board and editors-in-chief were arrested, and the agency was restarted by the occupation government in January 1941 as "Belga Press," which almost exclusively sourced information from the Nazi press agency Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro.

Following the Allied liberation of 1944, Travailleur, Antoine Seyl, and a few former staff members reestablished Belga, with operations continuing again on September 5 that year. Also in the same year, Belga began issuing reports in Dutch, previously being an exclusively Francophone agency. Increasing regionalist sentiments in the 1960s provoked a reform of the production process in 1970: two equally-sized departments, one for Dutch and the other for French, would produce content independently of the other within the same newsroom.