Divide, Delay, Deregulate

A public relations firm for major U.S. polluters worked to dismantle EU laws that require large corporations to make plans for cutting emissions.

The PR company Teneo undertook this work on behalf of the Competitiveness Roundtable — a coalition of companies including ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, Chevron, and Koch Inc. – according to documents uncovered by the research group SOMO and seen by DeSmog.

Teneo planned to persuade leading European decision makers to side with radical right-wing groups in overturning key elements of the regulations known as the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). 

The CSDDD, which was signed into law in May 2024, obliges large companies trading in the EU to address human rights and environmental issues in their operations and supply chains. It currently applies to 6,000 EU companies and 900 non-European companies trading inside the bloc, including U.S. firms.

“Teneo’s divide and conquer strategy is nothing less than an attack on the integrity of our democratic process,” said Daniel Freund, a Member of European Parliament (MEP) for the Green group.

The CSDDD has faced growing backlash over the last year from corporate lobbyists and political campaign groups. Lawmakers are expected to reach an agreement next week on whether to slash requirements from the law, including cutting the number of companies covered by the rules and watering down obligations for them to reduce emissions in line with international climate goals.

SOMO’s report reveals that efforts to influence this decision have involved the Competitiveness Roundtable — a group with “close ties” to the Trump administration. As previously revealed by DeSmog, pressure groups closely associated with Trump’s ‘MAGA’ movement have worked hard to undermine the CSDDD in recent months — describing it as “the greatest threat to America’s sovereignty since the fall of the Soviet Union”. 

Advised by Teneo, the Roundtable coalition includes U.S. oil and gas firms alongside chemical giant Dow and investment firm JP Morgan — the world’s largest financier of fossil fuels.

In over 150 pages of documents, including strategy outlines and monthly activity updates, Teneo provided plans for the group to ensure that decision makers adopt “the most extreme position” on the reworking of the law, including deleting company requirements on “combating climate change”.

The group also aimed to remove provisions that ensure companies can be sued in European courts if they break the regulations.

Industry efforts already appear to have borne fruit: earlier this month, lawmakers from the Parliament’s largest bloc, the European People’s Party (EPP), allied with far-right groups in calls to scrap the CSDDD’s requirement for companies to make climate transition plans. They also voted to radically cut the number of companies required to report on their environmental footprint in a move widely criticised by left-wing parties. 

“We cannot allow fossil fuel lobbyists to turn the European Parliament into a playground for manufactured extremism,” Freund said. “Europeans should be alarmed that oil and gas giants are effectively outsourcing their political strategy to a firm whose business model depends on driving wedges between political groups.”

Teneo and all the companies in the Competitiveness Roundtable that were named in this article were approached for comment by both SOMO and DeSmog.

In a statement to SOMO, TotalEnergies said: “Our participation in the ‘Roundtable’ (…) was organized by Teneo to promote competitiveness, propose solutions to EU policymakers, and foster collaboration among stakeholders. The company’s views expressed in this forum are fully aligned with those publicly stated.”

Right-Wing Alliance

The CSDDD has been subject to intense corporate lobbying since it was first announced. Between 2020 and its approval in April 2024, almost 90 companies and industry bodies, including 10 energy companies, lobbied on the legislation, achieving major concessions, including the exclusion of around 80 percent of firms originally covered by the draft law.

The most recent wave of lobbying — led by the Competitiveness Roundtable — followed an announcement by the European Commission in February that it would reopen discussions on the legislation as part of an ‘omnibus’ package to “simplify” multiple EU laws.

Following the Commission’s announcement, the Competitiveness Roundtable met weekly to discuss its strategy. It held at least 18 meetings with policymakers, hatched plans to “engage” with media outlets such as the Financial Times and Germany’s Handelsblatt, and pushed trade associations both within and outside the EU to “take a more public stance” on the negotiations.

The Roundtable’s efforts focused on convincing politicians to support weakening the legislation.

In a strategy document dated July 2025, Teneo shared plans to “encourage… collaboration” between two key right-wing European groups – the European People’s Party (EPP), and the more radical European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).

Teneo said that it would “Push the rapporteur” – EPP politician Jörgen Warborn, who is leading Parliament’s work on the file, including liaising with lawmakers and drafting amendments – “to side with the right-wing parties as much as possible and for the ECR to take an active role in the compromise amendment negotiations.”

ECR, which is led by Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, describes itself as centre-right but is largely comprised of far-right and ultra-nationalist parties, including those that have denied climate science.

Until recently, the EPP and other centre and left-wing parties maintained a cordon sanitaire, refusing to negotiate with radical right-groups including ECR.

However, the EPP has increasingly collaborated with ECR and the far-right Patriots for Europe since the parties made major gains in the EU elections in 2024 — resulting in significant wins for big polluters, including the weakening of climate laws.

“The worrying thing is: we already see an increased collaboration between the conservative EPP and the right-wing extremist factions,” Freund said. “Teneo isn’t inventing that trend, it is actively exploiting and accelerating it.”

This was echoed by Dieter Plehwe, a senior fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

“Corporations can now rely on the growing power of far-right representatives in the European Parliament and the Council to drive a wedge between the parties of the pro-European centre, and to undermine European regulatory power at large,” he said.

“Rather than promoting competition, European deregulation appears designed to bolster the power of the largest firms across policy areas – a form of state capture dressed up as competitiveness.”

Decisions on the CSDDD are expected to come to a head next week (8 December), as the EU’s three decision-making powers — the European Commission, the Council of the EU, and the European Parliament — conclude negotiations on the omnibus simplification package.

Leveraging Trade Tensions

The Competitiveness Roundtable also aimed to leverage geopolitical tensions, the documents show, particularly through its “close ties” to the Trump administration.

In June 2025, Teneo shared plans to “Ramp up pressure from the U.S.”, framing the CSDDD “as a key barrier” to a free trade agreement between the U.S. and EU. It stated that it hoped “to have the EU use CS3D as a concession in negotiations on tariffs”.

At the time, Trump was threatening to increase his 20 percent tariffs on most EU imports to 50 percent. The Teneo document suggested a plan to convince the EU to dilute the CSDDD in exchange for lower tariffs.

In July, Teneo outlined further plans to “Keep close ties with the U.S. Mission [to the EU] to ensure that the CS3D is on top of the .. agenda” for the U.S. Trade Representative — the body responsible for the United States’ international trade agreements.

Just one month later, in August 2025, the U.S. secured major concessions on the CSDDD, as part of a deal on trade and tariffs. The EU agreed to propose changes to the CSDDD, including on requirements for companies to introduce climate transition plans, in return for Trump’s commitment to freeze tariffs on the bloc.

These efforts appear to have been part of the Roundtable’s strategy to “divide and conquer” EU member states, which have played a key role in the negotiations expected to end next week.

Roundtable members, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies, planned to “establish rapporteurships” with countries including France, Denmark, and Germany.

Politico reported in June that French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz “all but kill[ed]” the CSDDD after they insisted on a major scale-back of the law.

At the same time, the Competitiveness Roundtable also worked to recruit other countries to its cause. It hatched plans to “engage trade attachés and embassies” in Brazil, India, and Japan among others, and “activate national governments” during key moments such as the United Nations’ COP30 climate summit, which was held in Brazil last month.

The new documents offer rare insight into the tactics of the PR industry – a sector that is worth over €14 billion in the EU alone.

The U.S.-based PR firm Teneo has previously represented multiple fossil fuel companies and petrostates, including Shell, Engie, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), and Saudi Arabia.

In 2024, DeSmog revealed that the PR firm had signed a $5 million contract with COP29 host Azerbaijan to promote it as a climate champion in the run-up to the summit, despite oil and gas contributing to more than 90 percent of the country’s exports.

Two Teneo employees also sit on advisory councils for think tanks and advocacy groups in the powerful Atlas Network, a shadowy group of think tanks and corporations that has successfully pushed against climate regulation in Europe and North America. 

Lack of Transparency

SOMO’s findings have raised concerns about a lack of transparency among EU policymakers.

The research group identified at least 18 meetings between Teneo, companies in the Competitiveness Roundtable, and MEPs or their assistants between May and September.

MEPs are obliged to record all meetings with lobbyists in the EU Transparency Register – however, SOMO found that at least three meetings referenced in the internal industry documents did not appear on the register.

Transparency records also show eight meetings between Teneo and MEPs that did not list lobbyists from companies including ExxonMobil, Koch Inc., and TotalEnergies, who may have been present.

Oil giant Koch Inc. is the second-largest private company in the U.S. whose co-founders Charles Koch and his late brother David have piled millions of dollars into causes promoting climate disinformation across the globe.

This is likely to represent only a small proportion of the total meetings held by Teneo and the Roundtable in recent months: politicians in member states (who will also get a say on whether to amend the law next week) do not have to record their meetings with lobbyists in the EU database.

Teneo told SOMO it is “fully committed to transparency and adheres to the EU Code of Conduct”. The firm’s requests for meetings with politicians “clearly identified the company or companies seeking the discussion”, it said. “As noted on the Parliament’s own Transparency Register guidance, the responsibility for recording and publishing meeting information rests with MEP offices, not with external participants.”

TotalEnergies also stated that it “conducts its advocacy in Brussels and in European capitals in full compliance with applicable laws and regulations, including EU Transparency Register obligations”.

Olivier Hoedeman from lobbying watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory told DeSmog that the failure of any MEP to properly record the meetings “would be in violation with the Code of Conduct for MEPs.”

He called for an investigation by the Parliament’s ethics advisory committee, adding: ”This might be part of a wider practice of hiding meetings with fossil fuel lobbyists by only mentioning the name of the lobby consultancy hired by these companies to assist them.”

https://www.desmog.com/2025/12/04/divide-and-conquer-inside-the-oil-and-gas-strategy-to-thwart-eu-green-laws/