BPP Communications Ltd., which did business as Bell Pottinger Private, was a British multinational public relations, reputation management and marketing company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. On 12 September 2017 it went into administration (bankruptcy) as a consequence of a scandal caused by its activities to foment racial tensions in South Africa.
Bell Pottinger offered services such as lobbying, speech writing, reputation management, and search engine optimisation to clients including companies, governments and wealthy individuals. It was the largest UK-based public relations consultancy measured by 2010 fee income. Lord Bell, who advised Margaret Thatcher on media matters, was a co-founder of Bell Pottinger, which, until July 2012, was a wholly owned subsidiary of Chime Communications plc. In June 2012, Lord Bell and Bell Pottinger CEO James Henderson completed a £19.6 million management buyout from Chime, with Chime retaining a 25% stake in the business.
The firm was described as having "the most controversial client list" in the PR industry.Pace, Richard, "Bell Pottinger Wins: Bail Extended for Atlaf Hussain's Money Laundering Charges", Everything PR, 7 October 2015. Retrieved 9 October 2015. It was criticised numerous times for conflict-of-interest edits that the company made on Wikipedia pages that involved or were about their clients. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the company was hired by the Pentagon to work in Iraq, making fake terror and news-style videos, targeting al-Qaeda, for the reported sum of $540 million.
During 2016 and 2017, a sustained "dirty campaign" by the firm came to light, in which it played on racial animosity in South Africa, including the creation of fake news, to benefit its client Oakbay Investments, which is controlled by the controversial and influential Gupta family in South Africa and had strong ties to the then President Zuma's government. In 2017, the resulting scandal saw the firm disgraced and expelled from its professional body. Chief executive and largest shareholder James Henderson departed, lead partner Victoria Geoghegan was fired, and Chime, its second-largest shareholder, wrote off its investment and departed. There was an exodus of major clients and other senior staff, with the result that many onlookers thought the UK firm was highly likely to close, while operations in the Middle and Far East could be sold to new owners. On 12 September 2017, it was announced that Bell Pottinger had entered administration, with some staff immediately being made redundant.
A September 2017 review by law firm Herbert Smith FreehillsReview by Herbert Smith Freehills, published September 2017 concluded that the firm had breached ethical standards, lacked appropriate policies for managing controversial accounts, and had brought the PR industry into disrepute, and the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) said the firm had received a "damning indictment", having breached four of its conduct charter clauses. The firm had previously claimed that the allegations were purely a smear campaign having no truth to them.
Following the company's collapse owing creditors £14 million, administrator BDO was reported to be pursuing around 40 former Bell Pottinger partners to repay around £4 million, with Henderson asked to repay £400,000. In April 2019, BDO said it could bring lawsuits against former Bell Pottinger partners for their involvement in work for Oakbay, which breached partnership agreements. Former Bell Pottinger partners also faced potential disqualification from acting as company directors by the Insolvency Service.
History Bell Pottinger's origins go back to 1985, when Timothy Bell and Frank Lowe founded Lowe Bell as a subsidiary of Lowe Howard-Spink. Bell and Piers Pottinger bought out Lowe Bell in 1989, and it was subsequently floated in 1994 as Chime Communications plc but retained the name Lowe Bell on some of its subsidiary companies. In 1997, following Labour Party's victory in the general election, three of Lowe Bell employees – Neal Lawson, Ben Lucas and Jonathan Mendelsohn – left to launch their own agency, LLM Communications. In 1998, the subsidiaries were renamed as Bell Pottinger after Frank Lowe demanded that his name be removed. In 2000 the Bell Pottinger Group acquired Harvard Public Relations and QBO, which was renamed Bell Pottinger Public Relations. In 2001 Bell Pottinger acquired MMK in Germany and also The Smart Company, which was merged into Corporate Citizenship when the Group acquired it in 2007. In 2003 Resonate, a consumer public relations company was set up. In 2004 Bell Pottinger Communications USA was launched and in 2005 Bell Pottinger Middle East was launched with offices in Bahrain in 2009. In 2009 Bell Pottinger Change & Internal Communications was launched and Ptarmigan in Leeds was acquired by the Bell Pottinger Group.
In 2010 Pelham Public Relations, a financial public relations business founded by James Henderson, merged with Bell Pottinger Corporate and Financial. In 2011, the merged company was ranked 14th amongst global, and 8th amongst UK, M&A public relations advisers by Mergermarket, the Financial Times-owned mergers and acquisitions data company. The company's M&A work included acting for Northumbrian Water Group in its agreed acquisition by Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings, for Richemont in its acquisition of Net a Porter, Qatar Investment Authority in its acquisition of Harrods and for Universal Music in its acquisition of EMI Recorded Music. In 2012 it was the second biggest financial public relations company in the UK by volume of stock market listed clients, according to the Morningstar (formerly Hemscott) financial data group.
In May 2012, it was reported that Lord Bell had agreed a £20 million deal to buy most of the Bell Pottinger branded PR businesses from Chime, with Chime retaining a 25% stake in the venture and a seat on the board. The MBO was completed on 30 June 2012 with BPP Communications (Bell Pottinger Private) trading as an independent business from 1 July 2012. Chime retained the Good Relations group of PR businesses, including Harvard, Corporate Citizenship, MMK and Ptarmigan, and some UK regional offices formerly branded as Bell Pottinger were rebranded to Good Relations.
Bell Pottinger Private acquired Centreground Political Communications Limited, founded by former Tony Blair adviser Darren Murphy, in June 2014. In September that year, the company launched a new service aimed at the luxury sector.
In August 2016, it was announced that Lord Bell was quitting as Bell Pottinger chairman to set up an advisory firm, Sans Frontières. He retained a 7% stake in Bell Pottinger. He later (July 2017) claimed that he had left the company partly due to concerns over its "smelly" activities for a South African client, Oakbay Investments.
The Bell Pottinger Group had been ranked number one in the PRWeek and Marketing magazine league tables.
Operations Bell Pottinger had offices in London, North America, the Middle East and south-east Asia. It offered consumer, corporate and financial, healthcare, technology, industrial, public affairs, public sector, corporate social responsibility, internal communication, crisis and issues management services.
The Bell Pottinger Private Group included Pelham Bell Pottinger, Bell Pottinger Public Relations, Bell Pottinger Sans Frontières, Bell Pottinger Public Affairs, Bell Pottinger Middle East (offices in Dubai and Abu Dhabi), and Bell Pottinger USA.
Bell Pottinger donated £11,900 to the Conservative Party in the twelve months to September 2011.
In 2012, the company planned to enable clients to attempt to influence European Union legislative processes by organising participation in "European Citizens' Initiatives", a mechanism intended for grassroots involvement.Kevin Rawlinson, "Revealed: lobbyists' plans to hijack 'people's petitions'", The Independent, 10 April 2012
Criticism
PR for countries with human rights violations On 6 December 2011, the British national newspaper The Independent ran a front-page story based on covert filming by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism which the paper claimed revealed executives from Bell Pottinger boasting of ways in which they performed reputation laundering for countries accused of human rights violations. Posing as representatives of a fake investment body linked to the Uzbekistan government, the journalists had filmed a presentation at which Bell Pottinger executives explained techniques used on behalf of their clients, which at one point Tim Collins of Bell Pottinger – who has close connections with Prime Minister David Cameron, Edward Llewellyn, and Steve Hilton – referred to as "dark arts".
It was also reported that senior executives at Bell Pottinger told the undercover reporters that they had written a key speech given by the Sri Lankan President to the United Nations, in which he had described military action against Tamil Tiger separatists as "humanitarian". During a meeting with reporters, David Wilson – the chairman of Bell Pottinger Public Relations – had stated: "We had a team working in the President's office. We wrote the President's speech to the UN last year which was very well received... it went a long way to taking the country where it needed to go".
One of the techniques specifically mentioned by Collins was the use of search engine optimization to alter Google results. He said:
And where we want to get to – and this will take time, this is where David's team are magical – is you get to the point where even if they type in "Uzbek child labour" or "Uzbek human rights violation", some of the first results that come up are sites talking about what you guys are doing to address and improve that, not just the critical voices saying how terrible this all is.After Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's crackdown on protestors during the Arab Spring, the Syrian first lady Asma al-Assad hired Bell Pottinger to run a PR campaign for her. This resulted in a Vogue cover and interview describing her as "the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies".
Connections with the British government In a covert recording, the executives claimed to have access to or relationships with numerous senior British politicians, including Prime Minister David Cameron; the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne; David Cameron's former Director of Strategy, Steve Hilton; James Arbuthnot (chair of the Defence Select Committee); and MP Rory Stewart.
Collins also claimed that Bell Pottinger had been involved in David Cameron raising a matter with the Chinese government on behalf of a Bell Pottinger client, saying: