One day before the kick-off of COP28 in Dubai, journalists from at least five countries received an email stating that the designated President of the conference, Sultan Al Jaber, had ostensibly stepped down from his position as CEO of a state-oil company. As president of the conference, he has a leading role in the agenda setting and the conversations of the summit.
Al Jaber is the United Arab Emirates Minister of Industry and has been part of the UAE delegations to the Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change in previous years. He is also an energy businessman, as he is Chairman of Masdar, the national renewable energy company, and also CEO of the State-owned oil giant Adnoc, the world’s
12th-largest producer
of oil and gas and an important source of income for the country.
In the email, a fake press release stated that he had “agreed to step down from his position at Adnoc”. It made sense, as Al Jaber’s role at COP28 had been strongly questioned by
activists
and
international media,
who pointed to a conflict of interest in him leading a summit trying to solve global warming, and heading a company that is part of the problem at the same time.
Moreover, only two days before the press release was delivered to the journalists covering COP28, the
BBC
and the
Centre for Climate Reporting
had published that Al Jaber had allegedly used his position as COP28 President to strike oil deals with other countries in bilateral meetings before the event. Al Jaber
had denied
those allegations.
Journalists from at least Spain, Germany, Portugal, Egypt and the USA, including members of ARIJ, received the fake press release on Al Jaber’s resignation from his most controversial position. It perfectly impersonated the official COP28 styling, with the summit logo and a link to visualise the text in a separate webpage, which is the normal practice in office communications, and most importantly a link to a live press conference later that day.
With checking the sender’s e-mail address and the link to the press conference, the email could be identified as fake: The sender’s email address was unreal
(media@cop28advisorypress.com while the real one is media-cop28-dubai@lists.unfccc.int) and so did the link for the press release (it started with http://cop28.press, an insecure website protocol and not matching the original, which is https://www.cop28.com/).
Some journalists, like Megan Rowling from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, soon warned colleagues on their social media accounts. In less than one hour, the COP28 official X account stated the press release was not issued by the COP28 team and had “no basis in truth”. Others quickly corrected their tweets.
Later that day, the Fridays For Future and WeSmellGas, two activist organizations, acknowledged in an email sent to journalists that they had faked the “prank press conference” on Al Jaber's resignation. In this second email, the activists demanded “that fossil fuel companies have no access to COP” (among others) and provided quotes emphasising the conflict of interest, like: “Expecting a COP dominated by the interests of fossil fuels to support the aims of climate justice is like expecting a tobacco company to solve lung cancer”.
The truth is that the impact of the fake resignation has been limited. Only a few media outlets published the fake resignation –although some still hold the fake title. In Spain, the public news agency published a wire copy with the prank resignation, but quickly corrected and
erased the tweet.
Two media outlets echoed the news wire (1, 2) but they have corrected the title or published the wire correction (1, 2). A Kenyan newspaper also
corrected it shortly.
The Arabic international TV channel Al-Hurra also published on its website the alleged resignation of Al Jaber citing the Associated Press. However, by returning to
AP website,
the agency clearly indicates that they “received a false press release that Al-Jaber had agreed to step down” and added that the official website of the organizers of COP28 confirmed that Al-Jaber is continuing.