LONDON - British PR agency Bell Pottinger
said on Wednesday it was exploring a potential sale after it
lost business for running a racially charged campaign in South
Africa, leaving its future increasingly uncertain.
Bell Pottinger said it had hired accountancy firm BDO "to
look at all options for the business including a possible sale"
as the tarnished company faced the prospect of being broken up.
Banking giant HSBC cut ties with Bell Pottinger and the PR
agency's second-biggest shareholder walked away on Tuesday after
it was thrown out of an industry body for running a campaign
that the political opposition said had inflamed racial tensions.
South Africa's main opposition party, the Democratic
Alliance, had complained to the Public Relations and
Communications Association that Bell Pottinger's campaign was
trying to "divide and conquer" the South African public in order
to keep President Jacob Zuma and his party in power.
Bell Pottinger worked with the president's son and the
influential Gupta family on the campaign. According to an email
published in South African media, Bell Pottinger said the
campaign needed to stress the continued "existence of economic
apartheid".
The communications preceded a sustained campaign condemning
enemies of Zuma, including pro-business elements of the ruling
African National Congress, as agents of "white monopoly
capital".
The slogan, aired frequently on a Gupta-owned television
station, quickly gained traction in a country where the white
minority still wields disproportionate economic clout two
decades after the end of apartheid.
The PRCA expelled Bell Pottinger for a minimum of five
years. The PR firm, founded in 1987, said it accepted there were
lessons to be learned, but disputed the basis on which the
ruling was made.
Bell Pottinger's founder Tim Bell, who worked on former
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's election victories in
the 70s and 80s, told Reuters he was sad over the fate of the
firm.
He visited South Africa to meet the Guptas ahead of the
start of the work, but has since distanced himself from the
South Africa scandal.
Bell has previously courted controversy for doing work for
the wife of Syrian President Bashir al-Assad, as well as for the
Pinochet Foundation, which works to promote the legacy of former
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.