Zimbabwe Casts About for PR Help

Appearing before a parliamentary committee inquiry into the lobbying industry, the head of Bell Pottinger, Peter Bingle, explained that the agency had been approached to represent the Zimbabwe regime headed by Robert Mugabe. "We will turn down clients. We had a call from Zimbabwe asking to advise Zimbabwe. We said thank you very much, but no. It would have been a fairly malign campaign if someone had run it," Bingle said. Bingle explained that when the agency was approached by overseas companies or countries that it would "talk to the foreign office, take a view, look at whether we would want to work for that type of country or company." Some of Bell Pottinger's clients have included DP World, McDonald's, Imperial Tobacco, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.