Lobbying on behalf of nasty clients

While the UK Public Affairs Council operates a voluntary register, many firms do not appear on it at all, and those that do often post incomplete client lists to obfuscate their relations with shady clients.

Saudi Arabia’s use of Western public relations firms has been well-established.? The Kingdom pays for a positive image of itself regularly. Five lobby and PR firms were hired in 2015 alone. The Saudi government, embassy and government-owned entities have been contracting with consulting firms for more than 30 years.

In 2015, it launched the website Arabia Now, an “online hub for news related to the Kingdom,” which features laudatory articles and blogs about Saudi culture and economic development, while glossing over matters that concern human rights, mass executions and the treatment of women.

In 2014, consultants at the PR firm Qorvis developed content for the Saudi Arabia embassy’s YouTube and Twitter pages, and ran the Twitter account for the Syrian Opposition Coalition, the Washington Post reported.

In 2016, it emerged that a subsidiary of French media conglomerate Publicis Groupe, which owns UK ad and PR firms such as Saatchi & Saatchi, distributed an article in which Foreign Minister Adel bin Ahmed Al-Jubeir justified the execution of 47 people on the basis some may have been modafinil200mg.net “terrorists”.

The exposure led to allegations that Publicis was helping the Kingdom “whitewash” its human rights record.

In the same year, WikiLeaks revealed that Riyadh had paid for positive media coverage and had used proxies to attack outlets that published reports damaging to the Kingdom. German journalists were paid 7 500 euros per month to write positive articles about Saudi Arabia biannually.

An international public relations firm has been accused of complicity in whitewashing Saudi Arabian war crimes in Yemen. The firm, Burson-Marsteller, was hired in March to shill for a military coalition, which was established in Riyadh in December 2015.

The company previously worked for the Kingdom in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington in 2001, placing adverts in newspapers across the country disassociating Saudi Arabia from the attackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals.

The 41 Muslim-majority member nations, known as IMAFT, has a stated mission of combating Islamist militancy across the Middle East and North Africa, but has directed its efforts against Iran.

The firm has also worked for Facebook. The social media giant hired Burson-Marsteller to encourage bloggers and journalists to investigate Google’s information on users, in what seemed to be an attempt to distract attention from its own anti-privacy activities.