The UAE paid New York-based reputation management firm Terakeet more than $6 million to bury a 2017 report revealing that the Emirati ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, had ties to sex workers and traffickers, according to a New York Times (NYT) report published on Sunday.
The campaign was designed to push the Intercept report out of public sight on Google search results. According to Foreign Agents Registration Act records cited by the paper, Terakeet's work for the UAE began in July 2019 and continues today.
Much of the account focused on promoting tourism in the UAE, but NYT reported that Terakeet’s work also extended to suppressing the damaging Otaiba report. Otaiba declined to comment beyond confirming that Terakeet has worked for the UAE.
The effort was kept off paper, with account manager Kenneth Schiefer moving to Washington for more than a year to work directly with Otaiba at the UAE embassy, avoiding a trail of emails or text messages.
The reputation firm had built a personal website for Otaiba, planted favorable leadership profiles on institutional pages tied to him, and fed those profiles links to UAE-friendly blogs written by Terakeet staff. The firm also used an anonymous Wikipedia editor handle, VentureKit, to create a fake sockpuppet account, Quorum816, and add positive material to Otaiba’s page. Wikipedia reversed the edits and suspended both accounts in 2021.
The campaign succeeded, and by 2023, the Intercept story had been pushed to page two of Google results. NYT reported that today, it appears on around page five for most users.
The UAE account formed part of a wider investigation into Terakeet's reputation-cleaning business for powerful figures and major corporations with damaging public records. The firm’s client list has included MetLife, JPMorgan Chase, Oracle, Target, Walmart, Disney, and Bain Capital, according to NYT.
Terakeet later tried to scrub the online image of Goldman Sachs general counsel Kathryn Ruemmler after her relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein became a public liability.
The effort intensified after Justice Department files showed Ruemmler's name appeared in more than 10,000 Epstein-related documents, including exchanges in which she discussed travel with Epstein, thanked him for lavish gifts, and offered him legal advice.
Terakeet also worked for Vista Equity Partners chief executive Robert F. Smith, who signed a 2020 non-prosecution agreement acknowledging that he had “engaged in an illegal scheme to conceal income and evade taxes” between 2000 and 2015.
Terakeet chief executive Mac Cummings defended the firm’s model, saying "Terakeet’s technology is built on a simple mandate: organizations must tell their own story."
Drop Site News reported in January that Jeffrey Epstein's close relationship with DP World chief Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem helped foster UAE-Israel economic and security ties that later fed into the Abraham Accords.
The report says Epstein arranged meetings between Sulayem and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, helped channel Emirati investment into Israeli firms, and maintained contact with Sulayem until his 2019 arrest on sex trafficking charges.