The chief executive of the Science Museum will no longer be involved in reviewing the ethics of its sponsorship deals as it emerged that he did not pass on a due diligence report on a controversial Indian company to the museum’s trustees.
Blatchford’s office will be bypassed in future reviews following the museum’s partnership with a green energy company that is part of the Adani Group. The group’s businesses include fossil fuels.
Documents released to the pressure group Culture Unstained through freedom of information requests show that after receiving an internal due diligence report on the Adani Group, which contained details of a dozen criminal allegations and environmental legislation breaches, a further report on Adani Green Energy (AGE) was requested by the museum’s officials.
This second, relatively clean report was then shared with the trustees in and AGE was announced as the multimillion-pound sponsor of its new Energy Revolution gallery in October 2021 which is due to open next year. It has become the most contentious sponsorship deal in the publicly funded institution’s history.
Culture Unstained has submitted a formal complaint to the museum’s board, claiming that the sponsorship agreement “cannot be considered legitimate”.
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Isobel Tarr, its co-director, said: “Something is seriously wrong at the top of the Science Museum … Adani’s emissions, corruption and human rights impacts were repeatedly dismissed, while Adani’s ‘green’ credentials were actively promoted by the museum’s leadership — this is a textbook example of greenwashing.”
Emails disclosed to the group show that after receiving the original report on the wider Adani Group in late 2020, Blatchford wrote to it saying that he was “delighted” it was considering an association with the museum.
An internal Science Museum email states that Blatchford had “taken note of the findings and [is] content to move ahead.”
Further email discussions involving the chief executive continue to refer to the Adani Group — not AGE — including ones last year from Blatchford about the “net zero ambitions of the full Adani Group” and whether this could be achieved “possibly earlier than 2060”.
The Adani Group is classed as the world’s biggest private producer of coal and the third largest developer of coalmines, including the Carmichael mine in Australia, which has attracted condemnation from environmental activists.
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Shortly after AGE was announced as the sponsor of the new gallery, Hannah Fry, a museum trustee, resigned her position as did Chris Rapley, the museum’s former director, from its advisory board. They criticised the museum’s willingness to accept oil and gas sponsorship.
Dame Mary Archer, the museum’s chairwoman, said in December 2021 that “each of the businesses is an independent, publicly traded entity with its own board of directors”.
The museum says that there are six businesses within the Adani Group, although the company’s website states that there are ten.
Its website states that Gautam Adani is the chairman of both Adani Group and AGE while Rajesh Adani is the managing director of the Adani Group and is on the board of AGE.
However, in December 2021 the museum’s board began moves to distance Blatchford’s office from future ethical decisions.
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Whereas previously Blatchford took the decision, if he had “concerns” about potential partnerships, to refer decisions to the board, now the museum’s development director will refer to a Partnership Panel, which is a subcommittee and advisory board of the trustees.
The global controversy over the Adani Group increased this year following a report from Hindenburg Research, a US-based investment firm with a focus on short-selling, into the company. It alleged stock price manipulation, accounting fraud, money laundering and criticised the opaque ownership structure of the Adani Group
Adani Group said at the time that it was a “malicious combination of selective misinformation and concealed facts relating to baseless and discredited allegations to drive an ulterior motive”.
Hindenburg said that the Adani Group had “left completely unaddressed” the core allegations it had made.
Following the report, Jo Johnson, the former MP and brother of Boris Johnson, resigned from a major investor in the Adani Group and Norway’s largest pension fund KLP divested from AGE.
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An internal Science Museum report at the time stated that “due to the close links alleged between the constituent businesses in the group, there were concerns that funds invested in ‘green’ areas such as Adani Green Energy could be funding parts of the business including coalmines.”
Tarr said: “Sidelining the director from future sponsorship decisions does not resolve the fundamental conflict of partnering with a coal-producing conglomerate. Our complaint therefore calls on the board to drop the deal and investigate how the director was ever allowed to push through such an ethically flawed decision.”
The museum disputes that Blatchford has been sidelined, describing the move as a “strengthening of our governance”. It said its trustees disagreed with “wholesale disengagement” from the sector, adding it urged “companies, governments and individuals to make the global economy less carbon intensive”.
Blatchford, 58, who has been chief executive and director of the museum since 2010 and former chairman of the National Museum Directors’ Council, did not respond to questions about why the original due diligence report had not been shown to the board nor whether he thought AGE was separate from the Adani Group.
He said in a statement: “‘We will open a fantastic new gallery in the spring on the urgent energy transition the world needs to see, a project made possible by generous sponsorship from Adani Green Energy, which is a major renewable energy business. Globally, massive growth in renewable energy is required and we need the energy sector as a whole, alongside governments, to step up to this challenge.”
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The Science Museum — Guilty by association?
A former director of a national museum used to bemoan that they could only turn down sponsorship if it came from a tobacco or arms company.
But in the last five years this has changed; it would be a brave — or foolhardy — institution that would now strike a fresh deal with a fossil fuel company.
So what is the Science Museum? Brave or foolhardy?
It is increasingly seen as an outlier in the arts world for its obstinate defence of its relationships with companies including Shell, Equinor — the oil and gas company which sponsors its children’s Wonderlab gallery — and AGE, a company within the Adani Group, the world’s biggest private producer of coal.
And this is not just, as Blatchford has been keen to stress, because of the large government cuts to cultural funding over the past 13 years. Even if state largesse was large he “would still want to have sponsorship from the oil companies”
He has previously said they have “the capital, geography, people and logistics to find the solutions [to climate change” and demonising them is seriously unproductive.”
This has not however been a problem for others in the sector.
Tate announced an end to its multimillion pound 26-year-old deal with BP in 2017 followed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2019.
The National Portrait Gallery announced last year the end of company’s 30-year sponsorship of its portrait prize and was followed this year by Royal Opera House and the British Museum.
Their decisions followed years of pressure from activists, trustees and artists.
The Science Museum has also been subject to this pressure with trustees and advisers resigning and scientists saying they no longer wanted to be associated with the publicly-funded institution which emerged out of the 1851 Great Exhibition with the Science Museum title officially adopted for its collections in 1909.
Blatchford and Archer, chair since 2015, have been at the helm throughout the years of protest.
It was announced at the end of last week that Sir Tim Laurence, the husband of Princess Anne and former chair of English Heritage, would take over the chairmanship in 2024.
He will have the responsibility of helping determine whether the institution continues to be, depending on your point of view, brave or foolhardy.
This article has been updated to take account of the following clarification: we stated that the Science Museum’s chief executive, Sir Ian Blatchford, would no longer be involved in decisions over the ethics of sponsorship deals. We have been asked by the Science Museum’s chair to clarify that, while the chief executive is not part of a new advisory group which reviews the ethics of those deals, he remains involved in decisions taken by the board of trustees. We are happy to do so.
