Hakluyt & Company

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Hakluyt & Company is a British corporate investigation firm. It was founded in 1995 by Christopher James and Mike Reynolds, both former MI6 officers. James retired in mid-2006, stepping up to the firm's advisory board, and was replaced as managing director by another MI6 “old boy”, Keith Craig who has since recruited so many former MI6 officers that it is now believed to be the biggest collection of MI6-trained intelligence officers outside of MI6 itself.^[1] Hakluyt even operates in a similar fashion, maintaining a large number of "associates" around the world who form an international network of what are effectively its agents, although it insists that it is an entirely independent business organisation.

The advisory board has included many high-profile figures in British industry and government, including William Purves, the former HSBC chairman; Peter Holmes, the former Shell chairman; Brian Cubbon, the former permanent under-secretary of state at the Home Office; Peter Cazalet, former deputy chairman of BP; Lord Inge, former Chief of the General Staff; Lord Trotman, former chairman and chief executive of Ford; Baroness Smith, widow of the former Labour leader; and Frank G. Wisner, former U.S. ambassador to India. More recent appointees include Bill Bradley, the former U.S. presidential candidate; Rod Eddington, the former CEO of British Airways; Chris Gent, the former chief executive of Vodafone; and Ralph Robins, the former Rolls-Royce CEO.

In 2001 the Sunday Times reported that documentary film-maker Manfred Schlickenrieder was paid by Hakluyt to investigate Greenpeace on behalf of BP, and other environmental groups on behalf of Shell.^[2] Shell believed that ultra-left German activists had infiltrated Greenpeace and were responsible for threats of violence to its staff. Schlickenrieder had previously worked for the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, the German domestic security and intelligence agency.