- July 2, 2021
- Posted by: Stratford Team
- Category: Business
It was a tantalizing opportunity, even for a highly paid energy lobbyist.
A man claiming to be a Dubai, United Arab Emirates-based executive recruiter was looking to hire someone to set up a Washington influence operation for a Middle East fund planning to make “a big, long-term bet on U.S. oil and gas.”
The job would be to represent the fund and “make sure their investments are protected from any sort of risk that’s coming down the line,” said the man, who went by Tom James and claimed to be a principal at the firm Harrington Rowe. Potential climate and environmental regulations were the fund’s top concerns, he said.
Is that “something that sounds vaguely interesting for you?” asked James, whose online biography listed experience working for the notorious British public relations firm Bell Pottinger and the United Kingdom’s Labour Party.
“Yes,” Keith McCoy, one of Exxon Mobil Corp.’s top congressional lobbyists, said during a surreptitiously recorded Zoom…