UK lobbyists accused of ‘greenwashing’ oil-rich Azerbaijan ahead of COP climate summit

Boris Johnson’s former business chief among British consultants paid “monthly fee of $25,000, plus bonuses totalling $50,000” to work part-time for Azerbaijani regime accused of human rights abuses

Pre-COP Climate Summit in Baku, Azerbaijan in September (Source: COP29 media.)

A lobbying firm with close links to senior British politicians and the oil industry is being paid $4.7million to help Azerbaijan’s authoritarian regime enhance its image ahead of the crucial UN COP climate summit next month, Democracy for Sale can reveal.

The lobbying giant Teneo, which employs Labour’s former Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw as well as Boris Johnson’s former business chief, has been awarded the seven-month contract which campaigners claim will help the oil-rich state “greenwash” its reputation .

On 11 November, the UN will host its COP 29 climate change summit in Baku, the Azerbaijani capital. The choice of Azerbaijan as a host for the summit has been controversial. Its economy is highly dependent on fossil fuels and critics have pointed to the regime’s human rights record including the imprisonment of climate activists.

An investigation by Democracy for Sale in conjunction with the i Paper and SourceMaterial, reveals that as part of the Teneo contract, one of its British consultants will be paid “a monthly fee of $25,000, plus bonuses totalling $50,000” while only working on a “part-time basis”.

Teneo’s lobbying team working on the Azerbaijan contract includes Boris Johnson’s former chief business adviser Alex Hickman.

According to US documents, Teneo will provide “media training” and advise on “narrative development” for the hosts of the COP summit. The lobbying firm’s work will be led by its Global Strategy President Geoff Morrell who is a former executive at oil giant BP, which is Azerbaijan’s biggest foreign investor.

While working for BP, Morrell chided “opportunistic” environmentalists for exaggerating the impact of the company’s Deepwater Horizon explosion, an oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 people and discharged four million barrels of oil into the ocean

Climate campaign groups have accused Teneo of helping Azerbaijan to “greenwash” its image. Lela Stanley, senior investigator at Global Witness said: “Firms helping petrostates like Azerbaijan … are complicit in greenwashing.

“Instead of focusing on glossing up their image, Azerbaijan and its partners should be making fossil fuel companies pay in to the UN's Loss and Damage Fund. Planet-wrecking polluters should pay for the devastation they've caused.”

In addition to its work for the Azerbaijan regime, Teneo has also signed lucrative deals to work with Saudi Arabia and the UAE on other contracts, according to our analysis of US government filings. It also works for some of the world’s leading fossil fuel firms including British Gas owner Centrica and mining giant BHP.

Kathy Mulvey, campaigner at the Union of Concerned Scientists said: “It’s a clear conflict of interest for a PR firm to be paid to serve both oil and gas company clients that are driving the climate crisis and the host country government charged with shepherding the upcoming international climate talks.”

Crackdown on human rights

Azerbaijan has been accused of intensifying its crackdown on human rights and media freedom since the country was made host of the world’s most important climate conference.

Last July, Gubad Ibadoghlu, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, was arrested while visiting family in Azerbaijan. Ibadoghlu had been a vocal critic of the Aliyev regime. 

“The regime’s main purpose is to eliminate those who stand against them. They saw my father as a threat, as a threat to their money, as a threat to their power. That was enough for them to decide that they needed to find a way to stop them,” his son Ibad, 24, told Democracy for Sale on a video call from Sweden, where he lives along with his sister and mother.

Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International said. “Azerbaijan is hosting an international conference on climate justice while actively undermining the main pillars of climate activism – repressing all forms of critical expression and protests and dismantling local civil society.”

Earlier this year, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev said that “having oil and gas deposits is not our fault. It's a gift from God.”

Speaking at a climate diplomacy event in Berlin, Aliyev said that “as the head of a country rich in fossil fuels, of course, we will defend the right of these countries to continue investments and production because the world needs it.”

World leaders, ministers, and negotiators convene at the COP to negotiate and rubber stamp plans to jointly address climate change and its impacts.

Despite hosting the environmental summit, Azerbaijan is planning to ramp up oil and gas production over the next decade, according to a report from a German NGO.

The country, which earns 60% of its entire revenue from oil and gas, has also massively increased its gas exports to Europe since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Lobbying links

Founded in 2011 by a former aide to President Bill Clinton and headquartered in New York, Teneo has quickly grown into one of largest lobbying firms in the West.

A major part of Teneo’s growth has come from acquiring smaller lobbying firms including Tulchan Communications, set up by the former Conservative Party Chairman Andrew Feldman. Baron Feldman continues as a lobbyist for Teneo, leading the company’s UK strategy and communication business where clients include Thames Water, Severn Trent and McDonalds. 

Shortly after the General Election, the firm also sought to bolster their links to the Labour government by appointing former Labour Cabinet minister Ben Bradshaw as a Senior Advisor

Although the US documents do not list Bradshaw as one of the individuals working on the Azerbaijan COP contract, when he was hired by Teneo, the firm’s UK chief executive Nick Claydon said: “Ben’s deep insights and experience in helping to understand the priorities and approach of the new Labour administration will be of tremendous benefit to Teneo’s clients around the world.”

Teneo’s senior managing director in the UK is Patrick Loughlan, one of Tony’s Blair’s former Downing Street special advisors and Labour’s former Director of Policy and Head of Research. The firm’s managing director Robert Fuller also spent six weeks volunteering to help Labour during the recent election campaign. 

Both Teneo and the Azerbaijan government declined to comment.

Additional reporting by Peter Geoghegan.