SA ad agency says no to the Guptas

R14.8 MILLION: WAS OFFERED TO POLISH FAMILY’S IMAGE

‘We felt business practices of company were not aligned with our values ...’

The board of directors of one of South Africa’s largest advertising agencies, FCB Africa (Foote, Cone & Belding), shot down a 2015 proposal to take on a R14.8 million PR and advertising campaign for the Guptas to polish their public image and that of their main company, Oakbay Investments.

The rejection was one of the reasons the Guptas approached controversial British PR firm Bell Pottinger to carry out a PR offensive on its behalf.

The FCB campaign proposal aimed to overwhelm the South African public with positive stories and “over-expose the public to the Gupta family and their business interests in a consistent and deliberate manner”.

The revelation about the campaign proposal is in the Gupta e-mail trove. A Powerpoint presentation was sent from an e-mail address at FCB to Nazeem Howa, who was then CEO of Oakbay Investments, one of the Guptas’ main holding companies. Howa, the e-mail trail shows, then forwarded the proposal to Atul Gupta. After that, the e-mail trail ends.

FCB Africa’s current group CEO, Brett Morris, said that the group’s board of directors unanimously rejected the proposal and no work was ever done on it.

“We felt that the business practices of the company were not aligned with our values so we would never work with them,” said Morris, adding that the decision was made well before “concrete evidence” emerged of state capture and other issues.

“We were also approached to do work for their TV channel ANN7 and their newspaper The New Age, but we turned down those approaches for the same reason.”

Morris said the proposal to Oakbay and the Guptas was put together by the group’s former executive chairman – but any proposal to take on a new client has to be approved by the board, “so that’s where it ended”.

After the rejection by the FCB board, the Guptas and Oakbay began searching further afield.

They were using a major Johannesburg reputation management company in 2015, but e-mails show that Howa and others within Oakbay were unhappy with that company’s inability to stem the tide of negative media stories. –

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