Guinness World Records is a bestseller every year, drawing in readers with descriptions of the longest accordion recital (51 hours, 43 minutes and 40 seconds) and the longest mullet hairstyle (172.72 cm).
Less well known is the company’s sideline of accepting money to help authoritarian governments put out positive messages about their record-breaking achievements.
This week, GWR certified ten new records for Saudi Arabia, which is condemned by human rights groups as a repressive state that is holding two people on death row who were children at the time of their alleged offences.
While individuals who submit records are expected to do something interesting to gain entry to GWR’s index, the records announced this week included “largest covered water reservoir for storing drinking water”, “largest multi-effect distillation desalination unit” and “largest dental hospital”.
Analysis by The Times of GWR’s database shows that Saudi Arabia has rapidly increased its tally of records since 2019. Of the records listed with dates, 54 were certified before 2019 and 160 afterwards. In 2023 alone it set 56, including “largest intellectual property lesson” and “smallest floating golf green”.
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GWR said that of the 223 records it held that listed Saudi Arabia as the location of the attempt, 135 were the result of paid-for consultations.
The company’s consultation service, which offers to “deliver a customised solution that works to your budget”, started as a sideline but now makes more money than its publishing arm. In its most recent accounts, for 2022, it made £12.37 million from consulting and £12.32 million from publishing.
The company, which began over an argument about the speed of a golden plover, employs 74 consultants but only 17 in its publishing arm. Its recent clients include the government of Turkmenistan, one of the most authoritarian states in the world, whose achievements include “most fountain pools in a public place” (27), “largest cycling awareness lesson” (3,246 participants) and “largest roof in the shape of a star” (12,046 sq m).
Human rights organisations said GWR was helping Saudi Arabia to launder its reputation. Zaki Sarraf, a death penalty investigator for Reprieve, said the country was desperate to improve its image through public relations exercises such as the £300 million purchase of Newcastle United by a Saudi-led consortium.
“The Guinness World Records should not be helping launder Saudi Arabia’s reputation and whitewash what is happening in the kingdom,” Sarraf said. “This is a country where child defendants face imminent execution and the Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, presides over a death penalty crisis. First it was purchasing football teams, now it is paying for Guinness World Records. And for what? To paint the false veneer of a country moving towards progress, not a deeply repressive state.”
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James Lynch, co-director of the human rights group FairSquare and a former British diplomat based in Qatar, said that GWR should declare which of its records were linked to payments.
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“The question is: what decision-making is GWR doing about the clients it works with? It is reputation-laundering for a state that just a few years ago murdered a dissident in an overseas consulate [the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi] and a couple of years ago sentenced a student at a British university to 34 years in prison for her activity on Twitter,” he said.
Lynch said that while most of the newly published records were boring, the one for “lowest desalination energy consumption” stood out because it sought to portray Saudi Arabia as a climate leader rather than a country determined to slow down the phase-out of fossil fuels. “Guinness is very much supporting Mohammed bin Salman’s economic and investment drive and when you’re supporting that, you’re also supporting his wider programme of repression,” he said.
GWR admitted that its “inclusive approach comes with risks, so we take our lead from the UK and US governments on where we are able to do business”.
The company stopped operating in Russia after sanctions came into force in February 2022. It added: “We would also decline to license our brand if we felt record-breaking was being used in a polarising or negative way at all, and this is something we look for in all of our applications. GWR is a business, and like so many western businesses, brands, sports events and so on, as Saudi society has begun to open up, we have seen interest in what we do rise sharply.” More Saudis were engaging on its social media channels and applying for records as individuals, it said.
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GWR added: “Our consultancy licenses our IP, offers the chance to have an adjudicator at a record attempt and provides other services associated with choosing the right record. Records themselves are never for sale; the onus is always on those attempting to adhere to the rules and break the record.”
