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Global Counsel, the advisory firm founded by Lord Peter Mandelson, is set to enter administration in the wake of revelations about the peer and the deceased paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
People at the company told the FT that chair Archie Norman and chief executive Rebecca Park had informed staff on Thursday that the “Peter Mandelson legacy” had led to the business’s collapse.
Half of Global Counsel’s clients had left in the past fortnight and a decision was made that it could not survive the crisis, said a person close to the company.
The public affairs firm, which employs about 120 people, has lined up administrators who are set to take control of the business on Friday.
A memo sent by Park to staff, seen by the FT, said the firm “will formally be in an insolvency process and will soon cease to exist” and that there would be “a significant number of redundancies”.
The memo said: “This has proved to be a terrible time for all of us. We have had to endure seeing everything we have built together brought down by the inexcusable actions of others.”
It is expected that some Global Counsel teams and offices will be acquired out of administration by rival public affairs firms which have already expressed interest in recent days, a person close to the company said. Advisory firm Interpath is being lined up to run the administration, according to people familiar with the matter.
Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, who set up Global Counsel with Mandelson, resigned as chief executive last week, while high-profile clients quit after the FT reported that the peer sought advice from Epstein on how to launch the advisory firm in 2010.
Documents published by the US Department of Justice also showed that Wegg-Prosser met the convicted sex offender when he was under house arrest in New York to share the company’s business plan.
Mandelson stepped down from running Global Counsel before he was appointed as the UK’s ambassador to Washington but retained a large stake in the company.
One senior Global Counsel figure said the firm was set to collapse because of the historic links between Mandelson and Epstein and that this did not reflect on the work of its employees. “There are a lot of well-regarded staff who have only been here for a year or two,” they said.
Jim Messina, a former aide of Barack Obama, had bought a 20 per cent stake in Global Counsel in 2024 in a deal that valued it at £30mn at the time. Messina, who owns The Messina Group, and Wegg-Prosser had originally discussed merging their two firms before falling out last year, said two people close to Global Counsel.
Messina had not been willing to put any more money into Global Counsel to keep it running, said one of the people. Messina did not immediately return a request for comment.
The company has offices in Berlin, Brussels, London, Singapore, Washington DC and Doha. It had been trying to raise outside investment for the past week to survive the crisis but failed to do so, said one person close to the company.
The person added that Global Counsel’s close relationship with government figures had gone from being seen as a “competitive advantage to a competitive disadvantage” in light of the controversy surrounding Mandelson.
Fintech Klarna, insurance company Phoenix Group, Barclays Bank, private equity group KKR and retailer Tesco had all ended their relationships with Global Counsel, while telecoms group Vodafone put its contract under review after the Epstein files were released.
Pharmaceutical company GSK, which has been advised by Global Counsel in the past, had said it “had no plans to engage with the firm any further”, while the Premier League has also recently cut ties.
Global Counsel declined to comment.
Additional reporting by Laith Al-Khalaf