French PR Agency launches lobbying blitz against Azerbaijan ahead of COP29

On the opening of the COP29 climate conference in Baku on November 11, the French public relations agency Havas headed by Stéphane Fouks, has stepped up its communications campaigns against the Azerbaijani government.

On 5 November, the PR firm sent an email to journalists offering interview opportunities with French lawyer François Zimeray. The message said that Zimeray, who served as the French ambassador-at-large for human rights between 2008 and 2013 and now heads his own law firm Zimeray & Finelle, would be “more than willing […] to talk about the role of French diplomacy and the importance of reconciling security, human rights and climate action”, in partnership with Havas.

When we contacted Havas about the nature of this partnership, the agency explained that while Zimeray “does not work with the agency on a day-to-day basis”, he is “quite committed to the issue”. The lawyer has lodged a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) on behalf of the families of Armenian victims forcibly displaced by Baku. Zimeray also represents several families of victims of the October 17, 2023 attacks in Israel and is lobbying for these to be classified as “crimes of genocide and attempted genocide”, according to a brief submitted to the ICC prosecutor’s office in early October.

Tel Aviv and Baku are themselves in good terms, however. Azerbaijan is a loyal customer of Israel’s defence and intelligence industry, which in turn wholeheartedly supported Baku’s last two wars against Armenia in 2020 and 2023. Tel Aviv in return is expecting Azerbaijan to remain an ‘outpost’ of the Mossad against Iran as the conflict in the Middle East extends across the region.

Havas is also currently involved in a slew of campaigns for Free Armenian Prisoners, an organisation which is pushing for the release of 23 Armenian prisoners in Azerbaijan. Among these is Ruben Vardanyan, a former minister of state for the now fully controlled by Azerbaijan terrority, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (or Artsakh) from November 2022 to February 2023, who was arrested in September 2023 by the Azerbaijani Border Guard Service (DSX) and remains behind bars in Azerbaijan.

Vardanyan had built up a reputation in Armenia in recent years as a philanthropist. The entrepreneur built his fortune in Russia with the authorities’ green light, through his former Russian investment bank Troika Dialog which he ran until it was sold and restructured into the current SberBank. In 2019, a bank data leak dubbed the “Troika laundromat” revealed a financial set-up by Troika Dialog between 2006 and 2013 to move money out of Russia through Lithuania and other tax havens.

Vardanyan renounced his Russian citizenship in 2022 but he has kept in touch with his business contacts in Russia. In October, his remaining shares in the Russian company Avtoinvest were transferred to Dmitry Artyakov, the son of the First Deputy General Director of the Russian parastatal arms conglomerate Rostec and former governor of Russia’s Samara region, Vladimir Artyakov, the Armenian press reported. Avtoinvest owns shares in Russian heavy goods vehicle manufacturer KamAz, in which Troika Dialog has long been a shareholder and is now well established in Azerbaijan.

Havas has put consultant Anahit Akopian, the president of the Committee for the Defence of the Armenian Cause (CDCA), in charge of the Armenian dossier. As part of its campaign in support of Vardanyan, the PR firm organized last month a series of conferences in Paris, Washington, Lyon, Marseille, Brussels and London, on the conditions of hostages held in Azerbaijan and Armenia’s precarious security situation.

Several human rights activists took part including the former Minister of State for Nagorno-Karabakh Artak Beglaryan, Karnig Kerkonian, a lawyer with the US firm Kerkonian Dajani, and Arman Tatoyan, a former Armenian rights defender who now heads the Tatoyan Foundation.

Havas’ wide range of clients also includes French water company Saur, which has found itself unwittingly entangled in the information wars between Paris and Baku. The company’s Middle East director Anass Derraz has been named in an investigation by Azerbaijan’s internal security service (DTX) and was arrested in July in Baku during a business trip. He remains under house arrest in Azerbaijan.

DTX and Paris, and its foreign intelligence service the DGSE in particular, have been at daggers drawn ever since intelligence officers from the embassies in Paris and Baku were respectively expelled in late 2023.