Thank you for following the link and for your support in addressing unfair competition from the government agency / entrepreneurial business known as the British Council.
I am compiling the experiences of genuinely entrepreneurial UK companies that have come up against competition from the British Council, while acting as part of the FCO and often presented as a supportive agency for UK companies looking to grow in international markets.
In our own example, Levant Education set up UK Education Exhibitions and paid for support from UKTI to enter new markets (Turkey, Azerbaijan and Iraq) which brought in the British Council to ‘assist’. Despite assurances that they would not seek to compete, they ‘cooperated’ with our projects for a short time before setting up carbon-copy exhibitions the following year, in Turkey and Azerbaijan. Only war and financial problems in Kurdistan prevented them from doing the same there.
The British Council used its ‘gatekeeper’ and FCO personnel & offices to exploit our business and ultimately compete with massive government-brand advantages the private sector could never match. This is fundamentally an issue of unfair competition and conflict of interest, as has been identified in the 2014 FCO Triennial Review.
The stories will be used to create a record of the BC’s unfair and predatorial business practices, and may be used to inspire journalists to investigate the uneven playing field we face in the international education sector.
Please keep the stories as concise as possible. They will be added to this website and if used in any other way, we will contact you for approval.