Tuesday 5 September 2017

Bell Pottinger does an 'Andersen'

It is all over fro Bell Pottinger, as a PR firm having your reputation besmirched (for entirely accurate an fair reasons), really is the end. They can go on about keeping clients etc, but nearly all their major accounts will be firing them today and that will be that. There will be no money to keep the payroll going and then there maybe spurious lawsuits to pay for with no cash to be found.


Stick a fork it in, it's done.


It is very reminiscent of the 2001/2 Enron scandal that ended Arthur Andersen as a global accounting business. They got caught colluding with Enron and that was that, all the clients left and the business was forced to do mini-mergers country by country with other firms, in the UK they joined Deloitte.


But this is a very good thing overall, you may think the UK losing a leading PR agency is a bad thing, but it really shows the rule of law in action and that immoral and irresponsible behaviour has consequences. At a time when all things British are being undermined by the EU, it is a strong signal that the UK remains a strong, rules-based Western democracy. Compare and contrast with South Africa where the people who hired the firm face no consequences and just laugh at the outcome.


Hopefully the better people at Bell Pottinger will get new jobs quickly enough and the world can move on, these experiences tend to be cathartic for an industry overall when the regulators and rules are driven to act.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

As I gather, the charge against them is stirring up hatred against white people. Surely if that's the standard the last five BBC DG's and last 5 Guardian editors should have gone too?

Only a week or two back the BBC reported as a main news item two SA farmers who threatened to shoot a black employee who they thought was stealing. I've never seen a news report on any of the thousands of white farmers murdered in SA over the last 20 years.

estwdjhn said...

Personally, I'll shed few tears for the poor darlings if they go the way of telephone sanitisers - can we get them to take a few TV executives with them too?

Electro-Kevin said...

Or as BBC Pidgin might report it:

Bell Pottinger, him don do a' Aaaanda-soon' ... heh heh !

Electro-Kevin said...

https://www.bbc.com/pidgin

Bill Quango MP said...

Losing all their spin business will give them more time to concentrate on #The Democrats. Forming a brand new political party and thwarting Brexit.

This summer's fun, quite sadly, was a man having a total mental breakdown live on twitter.
at least we now know why.

Anonymous said...

Very fair, I have had dealings with RSA since 1980 when I worked as a student on a gold mine and the last thing they need is people trying to make an already bad situation worse. I was pleasantly surprised that their actions where taken so seriously in London, after all they were running down white South Africans, who I thought were fair game. I have seen Zumba in action and met his entourage and I am afraid the future is looking bleak. There are far to many western apologists who excuse corruption and worse, the end result will be a predictable and sadly avoidable descent into chaos. Mandela gave the country a chance for a peaceful and prosperous future, Mbeki and Zumba have thrown that chance away.