NEWS ANALYSIS: How Bell Pottinger and Atul Gupta spun the BBC
Let us debunk the claims in this interview
It’s the radio interview everyone is talking about: a gasping Atul Gupta‚ Mr State Capture himself‚ goes on air at the BBC and says he believes all is well back in his land of milk and honey. He also tells the station that the leaked Gupta e-mails are fake and that he believes disgraced spin doctors Bell Pottinger are a "credible" company. Atul must be suffering a bit of Dubai sunstroke to believe a word of it. But the bizarreness doesn’t end there. James Henderson‚ the CEO of Bell Pottinger‚ the British public relations company accused of stirring racial tension in SA‚ told the BBC he believed that his team who worked on the Gupta family account had acted with the best intentions. This is a far cry from the "apology" Henderson issued recently when he also announced the firing of the Bell Pottinger Gupta account manager. "At worst we were very naïve with what we got involved in‚" Henderson told BBC Radio 4. "There was certainly no intention of collaborating with corruption. We were ...
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