Teneo, a firm with close ties to the oil industry, will earn millions for enhancing the the petrostate’s image as the government jails climate activists and ramps up fossil fuel investment

A lobbying firm with close ties to the fossil fuels industry is being paid millions to help oil-rich Azerbaijan enhance its image ahead of the crucial UN COP climate summit this month.

The public relations giant Teneo has been awarded a seven-month contract which campaigners claim will help the state “greenwash” its reputation.

Azerbaijan, where world leaders will convene on 11 November for the first major global climate meeting after the US presidential election, is a controversial host. Its economy is highly dependent on fossil fuels and campaigners have criticised the regime’s human rights record, including the imprisonment of climate activists.

According to US government documents reviewed by SourceMaterial and Democracy for Sale, Teneo will be paid $4.7 million to provide “media training” and advise on “narrative development” for the hosts of the COP 29 summit. As part of the Teneo contract, one of its consultants will be paid “a monthly fee of $25,000, plus bonuses totalling $50,000” while only working on a “part-time basis”.

Firms helping petrostates like Azerbaijan are “complicit in greenwashing”, said Lela Stanley of the campaign group Global Witness.

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

BP links

The lobbying firm’s work will be led by its global strategy president, Geoff Morrell, a former executive at oil giant BP, 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 disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 people and discharged four million barrels of oil into the ocean.

Despite hosting the environmental summit, Azerbaijan is planning to ramp up oil and gas production over the next decade, according to a report from Urgewald, a German non-profit group. The country, which earns 60 per cent of its revenues from oil and gas, has also massively increased its gas exports to Europe since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“Firms helping petrostates like Azerbaijan are complicit in greenwashing”

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

Kathy Mulvey, a 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.”

‘Bogus charges’

Azerbaijan has intensified its crackdown on human rights and media freedom since the country was made host of the world’s most important climate conference, according to Amnesty International, .

Prominent climate activist Anar Mammadli was arrested this year on what Amnesty described as “bogus charges” and faces up to eight years in prison. The human rights group said the charges against him were “fabricated and his prosecution is an apparent retaliation for his criticism of the government and his activism”.

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.”

Days before Mammadli’s arrest, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev said that “having oil and gas deposits is not our fault”, calling them “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”.

Both Teneo and the Azerbaijan government declined to comment.

Headline picture: oil installations outside Baku, Azerbaijan (Orkhan Farmanli/Unsplash)