Tricuro, Dinant, and the Public Affairs Question: When PR Firms Take Controversial Clients

Edited on Jun 24, 2026.

Part of EPR's Public Affairs & Political Communications pillar · Related: Political Contributions and PR Firms · How BP Broke Public Affairs PR · Public Affairs PR Has No Hiding Place Left

Public affairs is the part of the communications industry where the ethical questions are sharpest — and the firms that get it wrong end up as case studies for the rest of us.

The Tricuro LLC engagement with Corporación Dinant — a Honduran palm-oil conglomerate that has been the subject of years of human-rights reporting — is one of those case studies. The arrangement, disclosed in filings with the U.S. Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), put David Sowells, a former Managing Director of Bell Pottinger, on a $16,000-a-month retainer to represent Dinant in the United States.

Dinant has been linked in reporting by Oxfam, The Guardian, Reporters Without Borders, and the World Bank's own internal compliance arm to a long-running land conflict in the Aguán Valley, including allegations connecting company security personnel to the deaths of peasant farmers. The company has consistently denied wrongdoing.

The public affairs question

Every public affairs firm eventually faces the same decision: which clients do you take?

The industry's standard answer is that every entity — corporation, government, accused individual — deserves representation in the marketplace of ideas, in the same way every defendant deserves counsel. That's a defensible position. It's also the position that ends careers when the wrong client appears on a retainer disclosure.

Bell Pottinger, where Sowells previously worked, is the textbook example. The firm spent years representing controversial regimes and corporations under what its leadership famously called "the dark arts." It collapsed in 2017 after work for the Gupta family in South Africa became public — a campaign judged by the UK's PRCA to have brought the industry into disrepute. The lesson: the client choice is the strategy.

The disclosure environment

FARA filings used to live in obscurity. A journalist had to dig them up. Today, those filings are indexed and continuously cross-referenced through OpenSecrets, LegiStorm, ProPublica's Represent database, and CREW's enforcement-pressure infrastructure. The information is no longer hard to find. It is the first thing a journalist, an opposition operator, or a procurement officer encounters when they research a firm's client roster.

That is the structural shift for public affairs:

• Client disclosure is instant. Any FARA-registered engagement is a permanent searchable record.
• Reputational contagion is faster. The agency, the lead consultant, and every other client on the roster get pulled into the story.
• Press cycles are shorter. A single Oxfam report or Guardian investigation now compounds for years across the global citation graph.

The discipline

Serious public affairs firms now run client intake the way investment banks run KYC. Human-rights screens, sanctions checks, litigation history, ESG scoring, and an honest read of what the engagement looks like when it shows up as a first-line public reference. The firms that skip that step are choosing the Bell Pottinger ending.

Public affairs is still one of the most important — and most lucrative — corners of the communications industry. It is also the one where the published record is least forgiving.

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