One of the reasons lobby firms are controversial is because they often represent corrupt or undemocratic governments. There are plenty of examples One large Brussels lobby company worked for the Uganda government: ‘…to help blunt damaging reports from human rights watchdogs. It was also employed by the Serb Republic to polish up its image as a democratic nation – a challenging task – given that most people in the Serb government at the time had something to do with the war, or the crimes committed during the war.

Another firm lobbied for the government of the ruthless Nigerian dictatorship in the mid-nineties. The firm has a soft spot for money from the regimes of the former Soviet countries, or for their oil companies. It has worked for the less than democratic Azerbaijan government. The Brussels office also represented Kazakhstan, but they did not pay their bills so that contract ended.

This company was particularly embarrassed when an American magazine wrote a detailed expose. An undercover journalist, posing as someone from an investment firm with financial interests in the Turkmenistan natural gas sector, and with close contacts to the Turkmen government, managed to fool the lobby firm’s senior US management and gain some interesting insights into what ‘Lobbyists Do for Dictators’.

Despite some trickery on the part of the journalist, the lobby firm was more than prepared to work with an extraordinarily corrupt regime and even suggested some dubious tactics to gain influence. The price tag quoted was about US $600,000 per year.