A secret recording. Damaging headlines. Allegations of “treason.” 

For Azerbaijan, host of the COP29 climate talks opening in the capital Baku on Monday, reports that a senior official had apparently used his position on the organising team to pursue oil and gas deals might seem like a public relations disaster.

But President Ilham Aliyev, who has called fossil fuels “a gift from god,” can count on the help of a crack team that specialises in mending the reputations of oil companies and fossil fuel-reliant states — for the right price. 

In May, Azerbaijan signed a $5 million contract with the New York-based public relations company Teneo, instructing it to craft a media narrative reflecting the country’s “role in the energy transition and climate action,” according to filings with the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) made under laws that require American companies to report on work for foreign governments.

That story was always going to be a hard sell, given Azerbaijan’s plans to expand production of the oil and gas that earns 90 percent of its revenues, and allegations of human rights abuses in its conflict with Armenia.

The messaging appeared to unravel further on Friday, when the BBC published a clip [pictured above] of a video secretly filmed by advocacy group Global Witness showing the chief executive of Azerbaijan’s COP29 team, Elnur Soltanov, discussing “investment opportunities” in state oil company SOCAR. Soltanov is also Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister, and serves on SOCAR’s board.

Former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres called Soltanov’s behaviour a “treason” to global climate negotiations, the BBC reported. 

Azerbaijan’s government has yet to respond. But this is precisely the kind of PR “crisis” that officials hired Teneo to handle. And the DoJ documents, first reported by PR news site O’Dwyer, provide a glimpse of how much influence the company wields.

‘Cash for Access’

Founded in 2011, Teneo describes itself as a “CEO advisory firm”, and offers various public relations and consulting services across its 40 offices worldwide. Unlike most of the other major PR players, the firm commands the kinds of fees commonly associated with consulting giants such as McKinsey and Deloitte, and counts senior advisors plucked from elite boardrooms and cabinet offices.

One former employee — who spoke to DeSmog on the condition of anonymity because they feared professional reprisals — described Teneo as “basically cash for access, with a middleman, dressed up as a business.”

“Clients are told that if they need facetime with a CEO, or a politician, one of our senior partners will probably know them and just need to pick up the phone,” the former employee said, adding that they eventually left because they were uncomfortable with the company’s tactics.

Led by former BP communications chief Geoff Morrell, Teneo’s COP29 team pulled out all of its PR stops to present Azerbaijan as a climate champion, the DoJ records show.

Between February and July, Teneo’s executives sent emails and texts or made calls to 78 different outlets on nearly 500 occasions to try and land coverage with the world’s media, including prestigious titles such as Bloomberg and the Financial Times.

Teneo’s responsibilities also included training Azerbaijan’s state oil executives to nail their interviews when those media opportunities came along, and to provide support during PR crises.

Teneo and COP29 Azerbaijan Operating Company did not respond to a request for comment.

Business as Usual

Azerbaijan has appointed Mukhtar Babayev, a former SOCAR executive, to lead the U.N. talks.

With European countries importing more gas from Azerbaijan as an alternative to Russian gas since the invasion of Ukraine, the COP29 host says it has ample justification to increase production of fossil fuels.

Babayev’s appointment and Azerbaijan’s export strategy have led critics to accuse the government — which has yet to set a net zero goal — of using COP29 to justify business as usual.

“COP29 provides the Azerbaijani regime with a high-profile platform to promote the narrative that oil and gas expansion is compatible with climate goals, positioning both pursuits as mutually sustainable,” said Isaac Levi, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

Campaigners have also highlighted Azerbaijan’s history of oppressing activists and journalists that speak out against the state and President Aliyev, who took over from his father in 2003. In October 2023, Azerbaijani troops took control of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, driving out 100,000 ethnic Armenians and taking a number of political prisoners.

With these concerns compounded by the prospect of the United States pulling out of global climate negotiations following former president Donald Trump’s election victory this week, some businesses and politicians are saving themselves for the next round of annual climate talks, COP30 in Brazil.

‘Laundering Reputations’

However, these kinds of PR challenges, say Teneo insiders, are the firm’s specialty.

“Teneo is very comfortable working for petro-dictatorships such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia,” said one Teneo employee, who asked not to be named for fear of professional repercussions. “We love to say “living our values”, though I’m not too sure what that means.”

Teneo’s experience in managing the reputations of oil producers was a crucial factor in its selection by the Azeri government, added the employee.

Last year, Teneo earned $1.6 million advising the oil-rich United Arab Emirates (UAE) on its leadership of COP28 — a fee paid for by the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) via its renewables arm Masdar. Like Azerbaijan, the UAE had appointed the head of its state oil company to lead climate talks.

Teneo has also advised the government of Saudi Arabia — another oil-rich nation facing accusations of human rights abuses — including on how to promote its planned Neom “eco-city,” which features questionable “climate solutions.” In 2023, Saudi Arabia paid Teneo $2.2 million for advising its Public Investment Fund (PIF), the country’s sovereign wealth fund which owns a minority stake in the world’s largest oil company Saudi Aramco.

In February, Teneo — along with a number of other Western consultancy firms including McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group — defied a subpoena from the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations requesting information about the firm’s work for the Saudi government. Teneo said it could not share details about its work because of nondisclosure agreements it had signed, sparking outrage among U.S. lawmakers and human rights campaigners.

The Teneo employee said that in taking on such clients, the firm has built a reputation for handling state-led programmes — “even the ones that are difficult to communicate.”

“Teneo has proved itself to be both willing and well-equipped to deliver on these kinds of projects,” said the employee. “As a firm we actively seek them out.”

Casey Michel, who leads the Combating Kleptocracy Program at New York-based advocacy group the Human Rights Foundation, said Teneo’s work for these governments was “dangerous”.

“These are Americans willing to sell themselves and their services to dictators, who not only target and repress everyone from journalists and religious minorities to members of the LGBT community — but who rely on American firms like Teneo to launder the reputations of the most heinous regimes on the planet,” said Casey, author of Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World.

And it appears that at least some within the firm agree. A review of Teneo posted in July on the employer-review site Glassdoor by a “Senior Consultant” cited “Immoral work (gambling, oil, saudis)” in a one-star review.

Fossil Fuel Advisors

Teneo staff told DeSmog that the firm’s appeal to the Azeri government was enhanced by its extensive history of reputational work for oil and gas companies. 

Major Teneo clients such as U.S. oil and gas producer Chevron face an equivalent communications challenge to the COP29 hosts: how to reconcile plans to increase oil and gas production with claims to care about climate change?

A DeSmog review of lobbying registers, media reports, company websites, and employee social media profiles found Teneo has also advised at least five other oil and gas companies in the past five years, apart from Chevron. These include Shell, ADNOC, Occidental Petroleum (now Oxy), and UK-based producers EnQuest and Endeavour (now part of Waldorf Production). Teneo has also worked for BP, according to Teneo insiders who spoke to DeSmog and PR trade press.

Teneo’s fossil fuel expertise was on display when the firm participated in a roundtable called “Maintaining the Momentum of Decarbonization” in Baku in June. Organised in part by SOCAR, at least five oil companies were present, including previous Teneo clients BP and ADNOC.

Other major industry players to take advice from Teneo since 2019 include the world’s second largest oil trader Trafigura; fossil fuel-focused investment firm LetterOne; fossil fuel engineering specialists Petrofac, Centurion Group and Harland & Wolff; gas-reliant power utilities General Electric and Engie; biomass-burning power companies Drax and Esken Renewables; and industrial manufacturing, mining, and chemicals giants Tata Steel, BHP, Worley, and Dow Jones Chemicals.

In total, Teneo has worked with at least 22 companies with direct fossil fuel interests, according to DeSmog’s analysis.

‘Fuelling the Madness’

In June, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for PR and ad agencies to drop fossil fuel clients.

“Many in the fossil fuel industry have shamelessly greenwashed, even as they have sought to delay climate action — with lobbying, legal threats, and massive ad campaigns,” Guterres said. “They have been aided and abetted by advertising and PR companies — Mad Men fuelling the madness.”

Teneo, however, appears to be ramping up its fossil fuel expertise and industry access.

Teneo’s Morrell, the most senior member of the firm’s COP29 team, held communications and lobbying roles at UK oil giant BP from 2011 to 2022. Morrell oversaw some of the oil giant’s most challenging public relations crises during this time, such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Morrell’s former employer BP — also a past client of Teneo’s — has invested over $85 billion in oil and gas projects in Azerbaijan since 1992 and operates a number of joint projects with SOCAR.

Prior to working at BP, Morrell served as the Pentagon’s Press Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs in the U.S. Department of Defense for four years.

Several other Teneo heavyweights also have close ties to the fossil fuel industry. Andrew Liveris, a senior advisor at Teneo, sits on the boards of both Saudi Aramco and PIF. Teneo Chairwoman Ursula Burns was on the board of the U.S.’s largest oil and gas producer ExxonMobil from 2012 until last year.

The model of hiring big names was built by Teneo’s co-founders, Declan Kelly and Doug Band. Kelly brought the industry leaders, and Band the political ones (including former U.S. president Bill Clinton, a route into many high-level contacts for Band). In the space of six months across 2020 and 2021, both Kelly and Band stepped down, the former amid allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour at a fundraising party, according to reports by the Financial Times.

But Teneo appears to have maintained its reputation for high-level access despite its co-founders’ departure. One of Teneo’s top advisors, Natalie de Gaulle — great-granddaughter of former French President Charles de Gaulle — is a member of Baku-based cultural organisation the Nizami Ganjavi International Center. On December 26, two months before Teneo began working on COP29, de Gaulle wrote a birthday message to President Aliyev which was published in state media.

A Peek Behind the Curtain

Azerbaijan’s climate plans were classed as “critically insufficient” by the independent scientific body Climate Action Tracker in September. Nevertheless, internal emails, press releases, and media outreach lists filed with the DoJ show how Teneo has sought to portray the COP29 host as a positive influence on the energy transition.

A press release distributed by Teneo in September, and filed with the DoJ, featured an embargoed version of the COP agenda that had no reference to the global transition “away from fossil fuels in energy systems” agreed at COP28 in the United Arab Emirates last year. It did, however, include a “COP Truce Appeal” — a call from the Azeri hosts for the world to put down its weapons during the conference. As tensions with Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region rumble on, some observers have described the move as a “peacewashing” PR stunt.

In September, Teneo employee Fernand Le Fèvre emailed an analyst at the Paris-based intergovernmental body the International Energy Agency (IEA), asking them to update an article on the organisation’s website to “highlight the COP29 Presidency’s commitment to accelerating the implementation of the renewable energy transition.” The records do not show whether the analyst responded or not.

As well as the IEA, Teneo’s outreach covered major media outlets, including multiple reporters at the BBC, the Guardian, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, CNN, and the New York Times.

And in many cases, these efforts garnered results.

Teneo contacted Attracta Mooney, climate correspondent at the Financial Times, four times between February 29 and March 7, the records show. Mooney then interviewed COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev online from his office in Baku at the “Climate Capital Live” Financial Times event in London on March 8 — Babayev’s first interview since his appointment. A social media post advertising the event said viewers could “Hear first-hand what his plans are to tackle climate change internationally.”

The following day, the Financial Times published an article by Mooney covering the interview, which led with Babayev’s pushback against criticisms of the hosts (one of Teneo’s key contractual responsibilities is training COP29 executives for interviews).

In May, Babayev and his team attended a conference in Antigua and Barbuda on development issues facing small island states — some of the most climate-vulnerable countries, and loudest critics of the role of fossil fuel exporters in obstructing climate talks. Teneo sent pitches for “interview[s] on climate change effects on island nations” to reporters from Caribbean-wide outlet the Loop and the Antigua Observer.

In subsequent stories, the Loop did not mention Babayev’s long history with SOCAR, while the Antigua Observer gave over large amounts of space to Babayev’s defence of Azerbaijan’s fossil fuel industry and left it virtually unchallenged: “It’s not an appropriate way to condemn or accuse a single part of the industry, there are a lot of emission-creating industries, and if we start blaming somebody for an emission, it will not yield any result.”

During a July media forum in Baku, Teneo met with a journalist from the Pakistan Daily, a country which Azerbaijan sees as a strategic partner (Pakistan was the second country to recognise Azerbaijan as a nation following the dissolution of the USSR). A subsequent article in the Pakistan Daily described how the forum helped participants vision a “greener future” and showed “the new face of liberated Karabakh”, referring to the disputed region taken by Azeri troops in 2023 which was previously home to many ethnic Armenians.

The Loop, The Antigua Observer, and the Pakistan Daily did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

‘Strength of our Country’

As of July, the 19 Teneo employees to work on its COP29 account had spent over $400,000 on airfares, hotels, and meals while travelling to and from Baku for such engagements, the records filed with the DoJ showed. Employees from the firm’s New York, Washington, London, Brussels, and Hong Kong offices have been on rotation so that at least five members of the team are on the ground in Baku at any one time.

These employees have been deeply integrated into the Azerbaijani COP29 team. Three Teneo advisors were included in Azerbaijan’s delegation at the annual U.N. Bonn Climate Change Conference in June — listed as representatives of “COP29 Azerbaijan Operating Company”. One advisor who was present at Bonn, Alexander Keynes, was hired by Teneo as a consultant specifically to work on COP at $25,000 per month, and could earn up to $50,000 in bonuses.

Babayev said on state television channel AzTV in September that “a media team consisting of serious specialists” has ensured “there has not been a week this year when [the COP29 Presidency has] not provided information and made statements to international media,” according to Azerbaijani outlet Report News Agency.

“Now they all understand and see the strength of our country,” Babayev added.

This story was updated on November 9 2024 to remove a reference to a media organisation that Teneo had initially named in its Foreign Agents Registration Act filings but later removed via an amendment filed on November 6.