COP29 Executive Caught Helping Fake Company Make Oil and Gas Deals

It would have been hard to script a worse run-up to the U.N. climate talks known as COP29, slated to start in a few days in Baku, Azerbaijan. There are the finance leaders skipping a “finance COP,” the “extremely bleak” outlooks from observers, the slate of national leaders opting to shrug and stay home, and of course the election of the worst possible person to lead the world’s biggest economy and second-largest emitter. And now: a semi-legitimate scandal, where a group managed to ensnare one of the COP’s leadership team in what is at very best a very ugly-looking bit of scandal.

“COP is not about oil and gas,” said Elnur Soltanov, the CEO of COP29 and also, problematically, Azerbaijan’s deputy minister of energy since 2018. He said that to a representative of EC Capital, a company “specialising in global investments in the oil and gas industry,” in a September meeting. But he didn’t stop there; instead, he seems to have gone on to tout his country’s growing oil and gas industry and its national oil company SOCAR, its broad international trading ambitions, its pipeline infrastructure. And then: an offer to EC Capital to help “incorporate your activities with SOCAR’s activity during COP, so that you can … talk business to them and also participate in the COP29 process.”

Yikes! That sure sounds like a COP29 official, whose job according to the COP’s own website is to help coordinate the presidency’s agenda and deliver on the conference’s actual goals, helping to do exactly the opposite.

EC Capital, of course, is not real. Instead, the representative was an investigator with Global Witness, posing as an oil and gas investor.

“COP29 officials abused their positions by facilitating talks about oil and gas deals at a climate conference, pitching a dystopian future which includes fossil fuels ‘perhaps forever,’” a spokesperson for the group said, in a press release. “Petrostates are perfecting a sinister playbook which sees COP as just another business opportunity for polluters.”

During their meeting, Soltanov stayed on message to some extent — “the purpose is solving the climate crisis” — but seemed perfectly comfortable putting on his deputy energy minister hat for a country that gains a huge proportion of its revenue from fossil fuels. After the meeting, EC Capital followed up, and Soltanov delivered: he connected them with a SOCAR senior executive, who reached out about a meeting in Baku.

This is, to be crude, what we get. 2024 is the third year in a row that the COP has been held in a country heavily reliant on fossil fuels, following Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Last year, more than 2,400 fossil fuel lobbyists roamed the Dubai halls, easily a record. The numbers will be lower this year, because much of the hobnobbing set don’t seem quite as keen on a Baku vacation, but by percentage it seems likely to be similar or worse.

“The UNFCCC urgently needs to act to clean up the COP climate talks, starting by banning the fossil fuel industry from sponsoring them, and kicking their lobbyists out for good,” the Global Witness spokesperson said. “We’ve had 29 talks with an ever-growing crowd of polluters and snake-oil salesmen present. Let’s try the next one without.”