When Did Grayling PR End its Russia Dealings… Or, Did It?
With mounting evidence of U.S. / U.K. PR agency cartel activity, Grayling's roles in the PRCA / Francis Ingham "investigation" are alarming.
Did the London-based Grayling PR firm break the U.K. Government’s 2022 Russian sanctions to continue doing PR contracting business with and/or in Russia in 2022-23 and beyond?
OTHER QUESTIONS:
Is Grayling still involved, directly or indirectly, in the AKOS Russian PR association banned in March 2022 from the London-headquartered PRCA (the Public Relations and Communications Association) and ICCO (International Communications Consultancy Organisation), or isn’t it?
Any just how did it come to pass, that then-Grayling CEO Sarah Scholefield scored the plum position of being appointed “whistleblowing” chair over PRCA grievance processes under her “fit for purpose” PRCA governance make-over of 2022-23, such that if anyone – including PRCA employees – wish to protest Grayling’s apparent involvement in the Russian market, then they must go through Sarah Scholefield to do it?
The following except of the PRCA’s currently posted written “whistleblowing” policy was due to be updated in November 2024, but under current PRCA CEO Sarah Waddington’s management, the outdated posting remains PRCA employees’ only recourse to report misconduct.
Lots to unpack:
In 2021, @GraylingPR received PRovoke Media’s “Russian / CIS Consultancy of the Year” so-called “honor,” with Maja Pawinska Sims’ (@SparklyPinchy) write-up spouting effusive praise for CEO Sarah Scholefield’s (@sschole) Russian enterprise (@GraylingRU):
@SparklyPinchy gushed in her write-up:
“Grayling owns more offices in Central and Eastern Europe than any other agency group and its operation in Russia and Ukraine goes from strength to strength”; and “In Russia, 90% of Grayling’s senior management team is female,” but with no acknowledgement as to Grayling’s clearly discriminatory hiring practices.
When Russia / Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in late February 2022, this world event severely disrupted many multinational PR firms with heavy (and exceptionally lucrative) U.K. / London-based operations also inclusive of Moscow outposts as well.
Without question, Grayling was one of those firms.
By all appearances now – and by virtue of longer-term hindsight – it appears Grayling’s Sarah Scholefield may have been quite angry about the PRCA’s and ICCO’s Francis Ingham taking such an aggressive anti-Russia stance as to require shut-down of Grayling’s Russia office.
During pandemic years, Ms. Scholefield’s Huntsworth holding company (later rebranded as “Accordience”) boasted quite publicly about how its revenues surged in 2020, while most all other PR firms suffered severe losses and layoffs.
In hindsight, the braggadocios PRWeek trade headline begs the question: Where, precisely, was that revenue surge coming from?
However, once the Russian invasion of Ukraine occurred in February 2022, Grayling seemingly (?) stepped into compliance with both U.K. Government sanctions and with strident London PR association stances (PRCA / ICCO).
In fact, Grayling announced in trade media on March 31, 2022, that it was exiting the Russian market – albeit “regrettably.”
For example, this PRWeek story noted, “Grayling currently employs 40 full-time staff in Moscow, where it has operated since 1999,” but also quoted Grayling’s statement: “Regrettably, and in consultation with our Russian colleagues, we have concluded that we have no viable alternative but to close the business; we will therefore do so as soon as practicably possible and in a way that gives our colleagues as much support as possible.”
The separate competitor Omnicom holding company’s Russian dealings were epic (Ketchum, FleishmanHillard Vanguard, Maslansky + Partners), and it appears that Omnicom and Ms. Scholefield’s Huntsworth holding company swam closely in the same Russian waters:
But now, new questions must be addressed.
Strange, October 2023 date-stamped Grayling website postings (some 18 months after March 2022) assert not only opposite information about Grayling’s withdrawal from Russia but also effusive praise in the form of “quotes” attributed to the now-deceased PRCA / ICCO chief Francis Ingham as lauding CEO Sarah Scholefield – as if praise for Ms. Scholefield was accurately indicative of Francis Ingham’s feelings about Grayling when he died.
They were not. Any suggestion to the contrary are toxically and intentionally disinformation-driven, to the core.
What’s more, the outdated quotes were posted on Ms. Scholefield’s Grayling’s website after Francis Ingham already was deceased (he died March 16, 2023) and about one year after Ms. Scholefield had placed Francis Ingham himself under a bitterly destructive “investigation” for months (October 2022 until his death in March 2023).
Anyone who was inner-circle to Francis Ingham knew full-well that Ms. Scholefield’s actions of publicly placing Francis Ingham under “investigation” but without telling him what he was being investigated for or who his accusers were devastated both his professional life and his already-compromised mental and medical health.
Months after his death and upon review of legally obtained data, evidence clearly emerged that grossly unspecified allegations targeting Francis Ingham, coupled with repeated and egregious PRCA Board member non-compliance / procedural violations of “PRCA Staff Handbook” policies, occurred.
Multiple violations of policies under Ms. Scholefield’s PRCA Board leadership to Francis Ingham’s detriment were indisputably documented and reported in July 2023 to Ms. Scholefield once they were discovered, which was, unfortunately, months after Francis Ingham’s death.
When evidence of these issues was reported directly to Ms. Scholefield by me in a long series of e-mails (including an evidentiary attachment) from July to late-September 2023 (including a face-to-face sit-down meeting in London with Ms. Scholefield in July 2023), the issues raised were dismissed out of hand. In addition, I was told to “destroy” key evidence and threatened with potential U.K. legal action if I did not comply with demands for evidence destruction.
Grayling’s Current Website (May 24, 2026) Still Cites an Active Russian Office per Oct. 2023 Post
According to Grayling’s website (holding company: Accordience / formerly Huntsworth), an October 6, 2023, date-stamped posting states that Grayling announced “New Management Appointments in Russia.”
In addition, this October 2023 Grayling news release states the firm was then currently employing a staffer who actively was chairing “the Association of Public Relations Consultants’ (AKOS) Industry Standards Promotion Working Committee,” among other things.
This same release also mentions “Grayling’s 70 employees in Russia,” not 40 staff as cited in Grayling’s March 2022 PRWeek announcement claiming the firm was closing its Moscow office.
I first stumbled upon this alarming Grayling website posting in only recent months.
LINK: https://grayling.com/news-and-views/grayling-announces-new-management-appointments-in-russia/
In this above posting, the hyperlink to the word “Russia” (at end of paragraph) goes to a 404-redirect on Grayling’s site, indicating the user has mistakenly “taken a wrong turn.”
LINK: https://grayling.com/our-offices/moscow/
At a minimum, this bizarre October 6, 2023, post certainly documents Grayling’s depth of investment in the Russian market (70 employees at some point) and its intensive engagement in the AKOS Russian PR Association, including one or more employees in leadership.
When I cross-checked X (formerly Twitter), I found that Grayling had posted in September 2021 an identical announcement as the above news release:
The date-stamp discrepancies clearly matter.
As a timeline refresher, on February 28, 2022 – four days after Russia invaded Ukraine – the AKOS Russian PR association (of which Grayling was reportedly a very active member) famously was expelled from ICCO by the late Francis Ingham (Twitter: @ingers1975).
Francis then concurrently served as director general of the UK’s PRCA for some 15 years and chief executive of International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO) for about 10 years.
Strident anti-Russia announcements quickly followed in lockstep, by the PRCA, again with Francis Ingham taking the lead:
AKOS’s LinkedIn page was never updated to reflect ICCO’s expulsion of the Russian association.
What followed in 2022 for Francis Ingham until his death was a living nightmare.
As I learned through his first-hand accounts as well as from reading media accounts, Francis Ingham 1) received threats to his personal safety as well as what he described as blackmail / extortion threats on a routine basis, 2) was verifiably placed on the Russian Government’s “blacklist” (according to presumably fact-checked reports in both PRWeek and London’s Financial Times), and then in Q4 2022, 3) faced being counter-accused of placing his own members at risk, in a bizarre gaslighting / DARVO maneuver that spurred and whipped-up nothing short of an online gangbang of digital bullying, mobbing, and verbal abuse / public humiliation against Francis Ingham, with clear intent of not only seeking to get him fired from his 15-year PRCA post but also to make him unemployable by anyone.
With Grayling’s Sarah Scholefield looking on passively as then-PRCA Board Chair, the PRCA Board at no time in late 2022 or early 2023 issued any statement via its staff communications officer to ask PR industry participants in these online attacks against PRCA staff employee Francis Ingham to cease this behavior.
Regarding the PRCA’s staff comms officer at that time, he appeared to be poached to go work for a PRCA-hostile / “resigned” PRCA ex-board member, Ketchum / @redrobertino (Jo-ann Robertson), who was well-known to have been openly trashing the PRCA comms officer’s own boss, Francis Ingham, for months, with unspecified accusations / innuendo:
The PRCA comms staffer announced he was leaving the PRCA on January 12, 2023.
According to then-PRCA Staff Handbook policy, he should only have remained on staff at the PRCA for a maximum of three weeks’ “notice” period.
However, for some reason, Grayling’s PRCA Board Chair Sarah Scholefield allowed this person to remain at the PRCA for three-and-a-half entire additional MONTHS, even after he also announced to trade media on February 20, 2023 that he was actually hopping on over to Ketchum PR’s outfit (Jo-ann Robertson / @RedRobertino), whose anti-Ingham hostilities were already abundantly documented in the social media record.
After all, Ketchum’s @RedRobertino publicly resigned from the PRCA Board in October 2022 as part of the online mobbing campaign against Francis Ingham, in an obvious show of “no confidence.”
He received Ketchum’s “Welcome to the family!” tweet on February 20, 2023, but he didn’t start his job at Ketchum until April 17, 2023, one month and one day after Francis died.
The timeline begs the question of why Sarah Scholefield’s Board allowed such an obvious PRCA-Ketchum conflict-of-interest, via the PRCA’s own departing comms staff member…. lingering on the PRCA’s staff for multiple months, particularly since the PRCA Staff Handbook had written policies against such a conflicted set-up.
Ms. Scholefield also had opted in autumn 2022 not to issue any known statement pertaining to then-current PRCA Staff Handbook policy about “Dignity at Work” violations then being suffered by Francis Ingham, due to online bullying / reputational destruction from autumn 2022 forward.
The Handbook banned “harassment” against any PRCA staff member, including (as cited on Page 14 of the Handbook) “verbal and written harassment through jokes, offensive language, gossip and slander”; “visual display” of graphics to inflict intentional emotional pain; “isolation or non-cooperation at work, exclusion from social activities”; and “bullying.”
In addition to having consulted for the Chinese Government, the above individual (Mr. Barr, who earlier in 2022-23 operated on Twitter via handle bearing the name @10Yetis before he switched it to @PRAndyBarr) has been listed for years as a “teacher” in Stephen and Sarah Waddington’s “Socially Mobile CIC” DEI-focused PR training scheme.
In Q4 2022, instead of Ms. Scholefield issuing any statement on behalf of the PRCA Board telling the industry to cease the personal attacks against Francis Ingham, it was my understanding – and later documentation indeed proved – that Ms. Scholefield instructed Francis Ingham to remain mute in the face of the attacks, so that he could not defend himself, lest he otherwise be fired by Ms. Scholefield’s board.
One of the ringleaders of this attack – John Brown, founder of the now-defunct Don’t Cry Wolf PR firm – was being actively advised by Stephen Waddington, husband of now-current PRCA CEO Sarah Waddington.
Mr. Waddington falsely stated during the online onslaught that there were “no means” of issuing complaints against Francis Ingham, when in fact, there were two published and available means, both on the staff side (via Handbook) and the volunteer / member side (Professional Practices Committee).
For his part, Mr. Brown began claiming – apparently beginning April 1, 2022, in complaints to PRCA Board members that never were passed along to Francis Ingham as required by PRCA Staff Handbook policy – that Francis Ingham was giving “car crash speech(es)” and displaying “weird chest beating” about Ukraine.
Yet on March 31, 2022 – only one day prior to the date of Mr. Brown’s alleged complaint – THIS was the video (below) that the PRCA posted from an industry event. Few reasonable people could possibly view it and claim – by any stretch – that Francis Ingham’s “conduct” was unbecoming, at least judging from the solid applause from the PRCA’s attending audience:
https://x.com/PRCA_HQ/status/1509518364166672392?s=20
With regard to disinformation, it’s important to recall who precisely Mr. Brown chose to be in league with — and all the ways various parties benefited, later.
Mr. Waddington is / was a former Francis Ingham flatmate (circa 2012-13) who had his own history of working in Moscow for Ketchum PR (Omnicom).
After Francis Ingham’s horrific death, Mr. Waddington even wrote in a written “tribute” that Francis Ingham was actually Mr. Waddington’s “foe.”
However, a March 16, 2023, tweet by a certain PR trade media journalist postured Mr. Waddington and Francis Ingham as “mutual dear friends,” in spite of @SparklyPinchy’s intimate knowledge of the online bullying campaign that PRovoke Media helped platform / amplify.
(After I complained of this issue – among other things – to Grayling’s PRCA Board Chair Sarah Scholefield in July 2023, @SparklyPinchy abruptly deleted her entire Twitter / X handle, in spite of her some 6,000-plus PR industry following.)
All of these details as they pertained to Ms. Scholefield’s PRCA chairmanship role in 2022-23 became even more immensely significant, when:
- I engaged in a lengthy e-mail exchange with Ms. Scholefield from July – late September of 2023 / the day prior to the PRCA’s 2023 AGM, both seeking and sharing documented information pertaining to the horrendous circumstances of Francis Ingham’s death (my last correspondence to Ms. Scholefield was on September 27, 2023, less than two weeks prior to Grayling’s strange Oct. 6, 2023, date-stamped postings on their website… see others, further below); and
- Stephen Waddington’s own wife, Sarah Waddington, was hand-delivered Francis Ingham’s job on Nov. 1, 2024, 20 months after Francis Ingham’s death with no executive search ever announced or implemented. She simply was handed (gifted) the role — as if pre-ordained. (This PRCA announcement of Mrs. Waddington’s take-over was delayed for two full months until Jan. 2, 2025, during which interim time, the Waddingtons (via Mrs. Waddington) would have had full, unfettered, and unsupervised access to all previous / historic PRCA data / digital archives, records, past employment files / performance reviews / e-mail and digital archives, private ethics complaint adjudication document archives involving staff and/or PRCA members over all past years, financial / sponsorship documents, and every other kind of sensitive piece of competitive data made available to a trade association CEO… but without the PRCA’s own members knowing it during those two months from November 1, 2024 to January 2, 2025.)
This recounting of ugly and painful past history leads me to this chilling additional find that I made on Grayling’s website, earlier this year.
Grayling’s strange post on October 6, 2023, about its Russia / AKOS involvement on its own website was not the only concerning announcement posted by Grayling on that date.
About four or so months ago – in January 2026 – I also discovered similarly unnerving date-stamped Grayling website posts – also from October 6, 2023 – in which Grayling re-posted two, separate old / outdated PRCA news releases from prior years, spotlighting Sarah Scholefield.
Both outdated releases (by then, at least two years old) quoted the now-deceased Director General Francis Ingham, speaking effusive praises of Ms. Scholefield.
When I discovered these other two long-past PRCA news releases lauding Ms. Scholefield’s former PRCA roles with another post-dated October 6, 2023 stamp on Grayling’s website, I tried to give benefit of the doubt to Grayling.
I thought, perhaps this reposting was some kind of administrative error by Grayling’s digital team.
For that reason, I posted to LinkedIn back in January 2026 about the matter – including screen shots and even tagging the Grayling brand, to alert them to the discrepancies.
Yet the posts still remain on Grayling’s website, to this day of my writing (May 25, 2026).
Also, my LinkedIn post received no comment from anyone, nor any DMs.
So, simply put, Grayling / Ms. Scholefield have had months to respond to this issue, yet they’ve done nothing. This attitude leads me to the logical conclusion that they don’t care what they get caught doing: arrogance and hubris.
At a minimum, if Grayling’s seemingly deceptive posts were made as a result of human error, it seems someone from Grayling or Accordience would have flagged me to say, “Hey – it was an error, and we’re taking them down.”
But nothing like that occurred. Instead, the posts remain active all these months later, after also having been posted now for more than two years.
In fact, when I Googled “Grayling PRCA Sarah Scholefield” just today, these two announcements rehashing the old, outdated PRCA news releases (but with an October 6, 2023, date-stamp quoting a dead man) popped up as No. 1 and No. 2 in my search results:
No. 4 in the search results is another announcement date-stamped Oct. 19, 2023, “Grayling names new CEO as Sarah Scholefield is promoted,” which lauded Ms. Scholefield’s elevation to “full-time” holding company CEO of Accordience only 13 days later, after the errant October 6, 2023, series of posts – which collectively and essentially claim / heavily imply:
1) That Francis Ingham thought highly of and deeply admired Sarah Scholefield — even as he lay dying for one full month in a Salisbury Hospital ward (still unaware of what-all he had been accused of or by whom as part of the PRCA’s “investigation”) – and
2) That Grayling’s happy AKOS Russian PR affiliation is / was still going strong in 2023 and to hell with U.K. Government sanctions.
Interestingly, Grayling’s holding company formerly known as Huntsworth rebranded to Accordience in May 2022, only two months after Francis Ingham declared any PR firms working in or for Russia would be “expelled” out of both organizations.
As it turns out – and in retrospect – the re-brand timing appears to be linked with the fact that Huntsworth-owned PR firms were major players in the Russian market, with multiple Huntsworth agencies apparently active members of the AKOS Russian PR association.
There also resides in all this pro-Russia mess the egregious conflict-of-interest matter, of multiple PRCA folks using the same high-powered U.K. law firm, Lewis Silkin.
Lewis Silkin has quite a prior history of PRCA dealings amid the firm’s lucrative portfolio of PR / advertising / digital marketing client representations.
It is also of note that the PR firm acquired by Huntsworth / Accordience in 2022 (fellow AKOS member Cirkle) reportedly used the same law firm to advise the transaction (Lewis Silkin) as used by:
- The PRCA Board as then led by Sarah Scholefield in launching its “investigation” against Francis Ingham:
2. Omnicom (owner of past AKOS members Ketchum Maslov and FleishmanHillard Vanguard):
3. PRWeek’s parent company, Haymarket Media:
4. Ray Eglington’s PR firm, Four Communications:
(Mr. Eglington was Ms. Scholefield’s immediate PRCA Board Chair successor and is noted online by the PRCA as Ms. Scholefield’s co-contact for any PRCA employee wishing to register a “whistleblowing” complaint; Mr. Eglington also proclaimed in the compromised PRWeek publication that the PRCA would not “mark its own homework” but without disclosing his and others’ Lewis Silkin-legal-affiliation conflicts of interest relative to appearances of an active cartel.)
5. Other affiliations that pose obvious legal conflicts of interest that remain undisclosed…
What’s more, in terms of legally noncompliant interest conflicts as easily perceived on Lewis Silkin’s watch, we aren’t talking about just a few (“both”) PR firms here.
We’re talking about MANY firms, with the complicating factor that the PRCA is composed presumably of (100 or more?) firms not only in the U.K. but also globally, which, no doubt, have NO IDEA these behind-the-scenes legal representations / machinations and “favored status” slots by firms in PRCA board leadership are even going on:
CONCLUSIONS:
- Strange and deeply concerning events – including appearances of conspiratorial collusion that directly resulted in potential corporate manslaughter (as per criteria stated in U.K. law) — were allowed to occur here. These issues merit investigation by fully external / independent and wholly disinterested authorities to the PRCA.
- As such, I asked PRCA leadership in December 2025 and January 2026 to engage investigations and to alert U.K. law enforcement. As far as I can tell, I’ve been ignored.
- Under current leadership, the PRCA cannot be trusted not to “mark its own homework,” as clearly, the so-called “fit for purpose” new-and-allegedly-improved “governance” scheme rolled out by Team Scholefield in 2023 now lends every appearance of serving only one purpose: protecting cartel members.
- This precise situation has been going on in PRSA in the United States for years – including PRSA using as its more than 15-year legal counsel of record the same D.C. law firm used by Omnicom / Ketchum for Russian Federation lobbying during the Obama Administration (Venable, LLP). PRSA also has used the same audit firm for the same some 15-year period as Omnicom (PKF O’Connor Davies). Conflicts of interest are baked-in and stuck like glue.
Under Ms. Scholefield, the PRCA’s new “governance” scheme was pre-ordained to make sure Grayling & Friends stayed in-the-know on any inbound complaints, so that they could quickly be dismissed internally as “baseless” (or whatever the chosen excuse).
Example: The current five-person PRCA “Standards Committee” appears to include at least one Grayling executive.
The PRCA’s website listing of committee members utterly fails Ms. Scholefield’s much-ballyhooed “transparency” promises of 2023.
They don’t even bother to list online the organizational affiliations / employers of any PRCA Standards Committee member, thus requiring concerned PRCA members to have to hunt down who-works-for-whom on this Committee, to ensure members are not set up to report highly sensitive and “confidential” concerns of misconduct to one of their own direct competitors.
It is my personal opinion that Francis Ingham’s death in March 2023 occurred with overwhelming situational factors that were aggravated at the hands of excessively greedy, self-interested, and negligent individuals. I am aware of countless other situational factors that are too complex and lengthy to include in a blog post.
Perhaps it’s no wonder that the U.K. Government is in such sorry shape and that in only recent months, an Omnicom exec was leading comms at No. 10 while engaged in reported “conflicts of interest.”
If only Ms. Scholefield’s conflicted and troubling influence were merely limited to the U.K. …
