Invasion of the booty snatchers: how greed is spreading out from the City
"People are just the new domesticated livestock to be exploited"Blogger Halo572 has it right. It used to be said of the army that the squaddies were considered to be Class C stores: easily replaced. This is the, er, 'thinking' behind the mechanistic modelling of human beings to accept the grotesque disparities in wealth which, according to Lord Griffiths - vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs - is an essential pre-requisite to, er, "greater prosperity for all". Goldman Sachs is no stranger to the hubris that comes with globalised wealth, it's CEO having previously informed us that he and his colleagues are "doing God's work". Milton Friedman has, presumably, had a word with the Almighty since moving over to hobnob with Adam Smith, and all that Sermon on the Mount stuff has been quietly abandoned.Richard Lambert, the director general of the CBI, recently warned the small corporate elite being paid enormous sums that they seemed to "occupy a different galaxy from the rest of the community" and risked being treated like beings from another planet.
His words appear to have had little effect.
This year's season of annual meetings is shaping up to be a stormy one as executives defy the credit crunch with enormous rewards packages ...
Roger Bootle of Capital Economics says: "The pay culture of the City has affected expectations elsewhere. The whole climate is relevant here, because bad pay practices drive out the good ... Executive pay reflects a deeper underlying failure revealed by the banking crisis. The whole system of boards and non-executives has been a major failure. And scrutiny by shareholders hasn't worked." ...
In the decade to 2009, the average FTSE 100 chief executive has seen his rewards jump 125%, while the heads of smaller quoted firms have seen their pay increase by 80%, according to remuneration specialists.
This contrasts markedly with the experience of the rest of the population.
As Lambert pointed out, in 2000 the average chief executive earned 47 times as much as an average employee, but that ratio has now swelled to 81 times.
Figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies show that, in the past decade, real income growth in almost all households was under 1% ...
Observer 18 Apr 2010 InequalityGoldman Sachs finds $5bn for pay and bonuses amid fraud investigation
Bananas*!
Might of the multinational fails to stop campaigning film-maker
When international food company Dole brought a lawsuit against a small-budget documentary featuring Nicaraguan banana plantation workers who alleged they had been left infertile by a banned pesticide, it appeared as if the film-maker would be beaten ...
The company's efforts to silence [Swedish director, Fredrik] Gertten first began when the film was selected to take part in the Los Angeles Film Festival in May last year. Dole sent out warning letters both to film-makers and sponsors of the film festival who subsequently withdrew the documentary from the competition, although it was still screened – to a full house ...
Mr Gertten has been focusing on getting the film shown around the world.
It was met by acclaim when it was screened at the Berlin Film Festival this year, and now it has reached London.
Yesterday, the director said: "It is a huge victory to screen at the ICA since there was a moment when we didn't know if the film ever would be seen. Dole was never my target. I wanted to make a film on the big back-story of 100 years of banana shipping from the South to the North. I had worked in Nicaragua for 35 years and I knew all about the banana marches." ...
Independent 17 Apr 2010 Corporate MediaBananas! The Shocking Film Dole Doesn't Want You To See
Chiquitas Children
Corporate Death Squads Come Back to Haunt U.S. Companies
PeaceWork
Goldman may owe British taxpayers $841m
British taxpayers have a direct material interest in the outcome of the fraud case brought against Goldman Sachs by the US financial watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission ...
... the material fact to dwell on for now is that on 7 August 2008, just before Royal Bank was semi-nationalised, it paid out $841m to Goldman Sachs to settle a claim on credit insurance provided by ABN, the Dutch bank which Royal Bank had acquired (or to be more precise, it had bought a big bad chunk of ABN in the autumn of 2007).
Goldman then passed this $841m to the ultimate beneficiary of the insurance contract, the giant US hedge fund, Paulson & Co.
Now the SEC claims that the insurance contract would never have been written, and therefore the loss would never have fallen on RBS, if Goldman had told the truth about certain financially important elements of the investment product that was being insured ...
Robert Peston 16 Apr 2010Securities and exchange commission charges Goldman Sachs with conflict of interest in sub-prime mortgage asset sales ...Goldman Sachs charged with $1bn fraud over toxic sub-prime securities
The SEC's accusations are levelled against the firm as a whole and against a French employee, Fabrice Tourre, 31, who is now an executive director in Goldman's London office.
The allegations revolve around a collateralised debt obligation called Abacus 2007-AC1 that was created by Goldman three years ago and proved a spectacularly poor investment for clients. Within nine months, 99% of the mortgages in the package had been downgraded and investors lost more than $1bn. Paulson, in contrast, made a profit of about the same amount.
Robert Khuzami, director of the SEC's enforcement division, said: "The product was new and complex but the deception and conflicts are old and simple. Goldman wrongly permitted a client that was betting against the mortgage market to heavily influence which mortgage securities to include in an investment portfolio." ...
Guardian 16 Apr 2010Eager to increase his bets against subprime mortgages, the investor, John A. Paulson, canvassed firm after firm, looking for new ways to profit from home loans that he was sure would go sour.Investor Who Made Billions Is Not Target of Suit
Only a few investment banks agreed to help him. One was Deutsche Bank. The other was the mighty Goldman Sachs.
Mr. Paulson struck gold. His prescience made him billions and transformed him from a relative nobody into something of a celebrity on Wall Street and in Washington.
But now his brassy bets have thrust Mr. Paulson into an uncomfortable spotlight. On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil fraud lawsuit against Goldman for neglecting to tell its customers that mortgage investments they were buying consisted of pools of dubious loans that Mr. Paulson had selected because they were highly likely to fail ...
NYT 16 Apr 2010 Fractional Reserve BankingGoldman Sachs banker stripped of licence
Jeremy Warner on Goldman Sachs
Darling resists calls to ban Goldman from Treasury
Goldman Sachs set for bumper $3.8bn profits
Goldman to pay Tourre bonus despite fraud charge
Goldman Sachs implicated in shorting Lehman shares
Goldman doesn't get it
Goldman under fire on all sides
What really scares Goldman Sachs
The bank that thought it ruled the world
Goldman Sachs: a history of controversy
Top Leaders at Goldman Had a Role in Mortgage Unit
Goldman Sachs prosecution threatens to open the floodgates on Wall Street
Brown and Merkel attack Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs finds $5bn for pay and bonuses amid fraud investigation
For Goldman, a Bet’s Stakes Keep Growing
US regulators suspected Stanford in 1997
RBS lost £545m in alleged Goldman fraud
Goldman charge sends FTSE sliding
S.E.C. Accuses Goldman of Fraud in Housing Deal
Bankers are doing "God's work"
Public must learn to 'tolerate the inequality' of bonuses
Goldman Sachs
The boss of Xstrata, Mick Davis, banked almost £29m for 2009, providing a potential embarrassment for the Conservatives as he is a high profile supporter of their campaign against the government's proposed increase in national insurance ...Bosses stir up executive pay row with mega salary packages
Meanwhile Matt Emmens, chairman of Shire Pharmaceuticals, the drugs group that abandoned the UK two years ago and moved its headquarters to Ireland for tax purposes, made £10.5m despite only being a non-executive director.
News of the bumper payouts comes hard on the heels of details of the salary and bonus awarded last year to the boss of Reckitt Benckiser, owner of Cillit Bang kitchen cleaner.
The publicity-shy Dutchman Bart Becht smashed all previous payout records by collecting more than £90m in cash and shares in one year, the equivalent of £2.85 every second.
That payout followed his collection of £36.8m in 2008 when he topped the Guardian's annual pay survey of FTSE 100 bosses.
Since 2005 he has collected more than £200m.
It also comes after the CBI director general, Richard Lambert, warned that bosses risked being regarded as "aliens" living in "a different galaxy from the rest of the community" because of the fast-widening gap between average pay and boardroom handouts.
"For the first time in history it has become possible for a manager – as opposed to an owner – of a large public company to become seriously rich," he told a business audience last month ...
Guardian 11 Apr 2010 InequalityExecutive pay and bonuses
QinetiQ's plans to slash redundancy payouts 'sour' relations with union
Looking for the difference between New Labour, and Thatcherite Tories? You won't find it here!
Unions are threatening legal action over plans by former government defence research group QinetiQ to slash redundancy payouts to workers.
Workers fear that up to 1,000 of its 6,500 UK-based employees could lose their jobs as part of a restructuring that will be announced next month when the company reports its full-year results.
Staff who joined QinetiQ before 2001 are entitled to a generous settlement if they are made redundant: eight weeks' pay per year of service, capped at 160 weeks' pay.
These public sector-type benefits reflect the fact that the company, which has been hit by the squeeze in military spending in the UK and US, used to be run by the government and that about half of its workers are former civil servants.
The company's new chief executive, Leo Quinn, wants to cut this payout to the statutory minimum – a maximum of 30 weeks' pay for older workers – later this year. He also wants to cut the notice period of six months for compulsory redundancy, along with other staff terms and conditions.
The management consulting firm McKinsey has been carrying out an external review of the business and is expected to report soon ...Guardian 06 April 2010 'Greed is Good, Greed Works'MPs slate Qinetiq privatisation
Committee chairman Edward Leigh said ... MoD conducted the 2003 deal "like an innocent at a table of cardsharps, with the taxpayer the fall guy losing out on nearly £100m" ...
BBC NEWS 10 June 2008Qinetiq deal 'cost UK taxpayers'
Qinetiq's 10 most senior managers gained £107.5m after the move, a return of 19,990% for their total £540,000 investment in shares, a return labelled "excessive" by the NAO.
Qinetiq's two most senior executives, chairman Sir John Chisholm and chief executive Graham Love, made spectacular gains.
Sir John invested £129,000 in the company and now has shares worth £23m. Graham Love turned £106,000 into £20m.
Qinetiq's bosses were allowed to negotiate the terms of the incentive scheme with Carlyle while the private equity firm was bidding for the business, the NAO added.
Conservative MP Edward Leigh, chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, said the taxpayer had been "short-changed" and that top Qinetiq managers had "won the jackpot" ...
BBC NEWS 23 Nov 2007;NAO report attacks QinetiQ float deals
Greed of the highest order
The Conservative party has joined forces with the main employers group, the CBI, in an attempt to dilute a new bribery bill that was meant to clean up corporate corruption in the wake of the BAE scandal.Conservatives attempt to water down bribery bill under CBI pressure
More than 20 amendments have been put down by the Tories following pressure from the CBI against proposed legislation from the Ministry of Justice that had previously received cross-party support.
Campaign group Transparency International said it was "extremely concerned" that there was a deliberate attempt to derail future new laws that were vital to re-establish the international credibility of the British business community.
It said: "The bill represents the best possible consensus that can be attained among a wide range of stakeholders on a modern, effective legal framework to prosecute bribery and make the UK compliant with the 1997 OECD anti-bribery convention." ...
Britain has slipped to 17th place in the annual corruption perceptions index compiled by Transparency International and now trails Japan, Hong Kong and Austria ...
Guardian 05 April 2010 David CameronCBI and Tories play games with bribery bill
His remuneration included a base salary of £1.1m and a reduced cash bonus of £1.6m. The largest part of the remainder of the package came from Mr Chapman's exercising £15.5m of share options in September ...Gas chief pockets £28m after 26 per cent dip in profits
Independent 05 April 2010 Inequality
The US bank BB&T has agreed to make a payment of $890m (£580m) to cover taxes, penalties and interest on an offshore tax avoidance scheme said to have been set up with the help of Barclays ...US bank BB&T pays $890m to authorities over tax avoidance scheme linked to Barclays advisers
The deal, which ran between 2002 and 2007, has been challenged by the US tax authorities.
Sources in Britain told the Guardian that the tax investigation, revealed in BB&T's annual US filing of accounts, relates to an offshore structure set up with the help of Structured Capital Markets (SCM), Barclays' tax avoidance unit in London.
Last year the Guardian published leaked Barclays documents on its website detailing dozens of offshore tax avoidance schemes set up by SCM. One of the documents, Project Knight, contained details of new billion-dollar schemes and also of an offshore tax avoidance transaction with BB&T between 2002 and 2007, called Stars.
The Stars deal involved a loan from BB&T of $1.5bn being routed through a complicated series of offshore vehicles, for which the US bank received a "pre-tax enhancement" of £53.5m per year. The Guardian was forced by an injunction won by Barclays to remove the documents from its website, but remains free to discuss their contents.
Guardian 02 Apr 2010 Fractional Reserve BankingTax Avoidance
Campaigners may decide to pursue an appeal, while Lord Justice Thomas frowns on 'low' fines ...Serious Fraud Office backs £30m BAE plea bargain despite opposition
Richard Alderman, head of the Serious Fraud Office, plans to press ahead with a controversial £30m plea bargain with the arms company BAE, legal sources say, despite criticism of such deals from a senior judge and anti-corruption campaigners.
Alderman's recent campaign against companies alleged to practise bribery overseas is throwing up novel legal problems.
Two protesting groups took his BAE deal to court, saying it was too soft, but a judge ruled against them. The Cornerhouse and the Campaign Against Arms Trade will decide whether to pursue an appeal after Easter. If their legal challenge is dropped, the way will then be clear for the deal thrashed out with BAE's lawyers to go ahead.
But the arms giant may end up facing the prospect of a bigger fine. Lord Justice Thomas gave a landmark ruling earlier this month in another corruption case, involving the chemical firm Innospec, that the agreed fine was too low, and such corporate crime should be treated more seriously ...
Guardian 01 April 2010 BAE Systems
A worried accounting executive at Lehman Brothers, who raised the alarm about what he saw as dubious number-crunching at the doomed Wall Street bank, lost his job barely a month after alerting the auditor Ernst & Young, his lawyer claimed yesterday, in a case prompting calls for tighter protection for corporate whistleblowers.Lehman whistleblower lost his job weeks after raising alarm
Matthew Lee, a senior vice-president in Lehman's finance division, outlined six allegations of unethical accounting in a memo sent on 16 May 2008 to Lehman's senior managers, who asked Ernst & Young to investigate. In discussions with partners at Ernst & Young, he highlighted controversial "repo 105" transactions that artificially boosted Lehman's balance sheet by $50bn (£33bn).
But the London-based accounting firm took "virtually no action", according to an official report into Lehman's demise and Lee's lawyer, Erwin Shustak, said his client lost his job in late June 2008, officially as part of a broader downsizing.
Shustak told the Wall Street Journal: "It was just easier to shut him up and let him go." ...
Guardian 16 Mar 2010 FRB LogCorporate governance
Britain's financial centre faced fresh embarrassment yesterday after it emerged that London played a crucial role in Lehman Brothers concealing debts of up to $50.4bn (£33.2bn) in the run-up to its collapse.London link to $50bn Lehman cover-up
The failed investment bank approached a London law firm over plans to use a controversial accounting trick – known internally as "Repo 105" – to temporarily conceal the liabilities ...
The bank used the Repo 105 tactic in the run-up to the end of its three-month financial reporting periods to help cushion the blow of huge losses in the first half of 2008 and suggest its financial health was far more robust than it was.
Linklaters – which drafted a document which stated that the technique was legal under UK law – was only approached after Lehman was unable to find an American law firm to say that the Repo 105 transactions could be carried out in the US.
A 2,200-page report into the collapse of the 58-year-old institution, by US legal examiner Anton Valukas, stated all subsequent trading was "under the aegis of an opinion letter" written by the Linklaters law firm.
It meant that a string of trades which masked the firm's parlous state from regulators and investors had to go through London ...
Auditor Ernst & Young, the report found, was aware of the company's status but failed to question it ...
Independent 13 Mar 2010 Fractional Reserve Banking LogAuditors face inquiry call after Lehman revelations
Lehman’s $50 billion conjuring trick
'Lehman painted a misleading picture of its condition'
Supermarket suppliers under fire as one-fifth of workers interviewed for inquiry report being pushed or hit ...Violence and abuse rife in food factories
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said it has uncovered significant evidence of abuse among producers supplying Britain's big supermarkets ...
The inquiry includes reports from meat factory workers who say they have had frozen burgers thrown at them by line managers, and accounts of pregnant women being forced to stand for long periods or perform heavy lifting under threat of the sack.
It also contained reports from women with heavy periods and people with bladder problems on production lines being denied toilet breaks and forced to endure the humiliation of bleeding and urinating on themselves.
One-fifth of workers interviewed, from across England and Wales, reported being pushed, kicked or having things thrown at them, while a third had experienced or witnessed verbal abuse ...
Neil Kinghan, the EHRC director general, said: "We have heard stories of workers subjected to bullying, violence and being humiliated and degraded by being denied toilet breaks. Some workers feel they have little choice but to put up with these conditions out of economic necessity. Others lack the language skills to understand and assert their rights ... " ...
Guardian 13 Mar 2010 Agency Workers Social DarwinismEHRC food factories report
British diplomats will today begin the final stage of a desperate rearguard action against new European legislation that London-based hedge funds and private equity firms warn could drive them out of business.Britain in final push to tone down EU hedge fund rules
While Britain has been fighting for some time for a significant watering down of the reforms proposed by the Alternative Investment Fund Management (AIFM) directive, time is running out to secure concessions on behalf of the City, where much of Europe's hedge fund and private equity sector is based.
A source close to the talks warned "the UK is not going to get everything it wants" ...
Independent 08 Mar 2010
Political pressure is mounting to make businesses pay for the damage they cause to the environment, and the latest UN study assessing the impact of the world's biggest companies is almost certainly the first stage in a concerted campaign to calculate how much damage is caused, what it is worth and ultimately how it can be stopped ...Time to clean up: UN study reveals environmental cost of world trade
Amid growing momentum for more limits on operations, taxes and fines, investor groups such as the US-based Ceres, which represents more than 80 funds managing more than $8tn (£5tn) of assets, are lobbying hard for companies to monitor, report and reduce their impact before they are forced to by legislation. So far, however, reporting is patchy and hard to compare ...
By far the most "damaging" were the utilities, where the $400bn total "cost" was dominated by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, nuclear waste, acid rain and smog precursors, and metal pollution in water ...
At a lecture last week, (UN special adviser Pavan) Sukhdev told his audience a story related to him by a fisherman he met last year in West Africa. The fisherman explained that foreign trawlers had fished until the North Atlantic was nearly empty. Then the big ships and their machinery had moved south in search of fuller nets, into the coastal waters near his village. The result was that the water where the fisherman once caught food for his family and to sell in the local market now also has too few fish ...
Guardian 19 Feb 2010Corporate social responsibility
An alumina refinery operated by a subsidiary of UK-based FTSE 100 company Vedanta Resources in Orissa, India, is causing air and water pollution that threatens the health of local people and their access to water, says a new report from Amnesty International today (Tuesday 9 February).UK-based company devastating communities in India
“We used to bathe in the river but now I am scared of taking my children there. Both my sons have had rashes and blisters.” a local woman told Amnesty International.
The organisation recorded many similar accounts from people living around the Lanjigarh refinery.
Imminent plans for a six-fold expansion of the refinery will compound these problems.
A government regulatory authority, the Orissa State Pollution Control Board, has documented air and water pollution from the refinery yet there has been no health monitoring.
Information on the extent of pollution and its possible effects has not been shared with local communities ...
Amnesty 09 Feb 2010Action Aid
Survival
Guardian
Wikipedia
BBC NEWS
Ecologist
Where previously these companies have thought of themselves as laboratories for world-changing drugs, there seems to be an emerging view that their core competence is, in fact, their aggressive – and always controversial – ability to market their drugs to doctors and (in the US) patients.Big Pharma ignores R&D at its peril
Announcements by Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, the two industry goliaths, this week, and AstraZeneca earlier, have put concerns about return on investment in R&D front and centre.
AstraZeneca responded with 8,000 job cuts, Pfizer promised to lop 25 per cent from its research budget ...
Sensing the wind in their favour, revolutionaries on Wall Street and in consulting argue that shareholders will be best served by Big Pharma ending all early-stage drug research entirely.
Cheaper, they say, to license in new compounds from smaller biotech-style companies, or from academia, after they have already shown promise.
Drug research is a game of trial and error. Analysts at Morgan Stanley, who have been pushing a Pharma 2.0 model based on in-licensing, reckon the return on investment on licensed products is three times higher than on in-house research, at least in the current economic conditions.
Yes, the big drug companies will have to pay out more in royalties to the drugs' inventors, but the cost savings more than make up for that ...
Independent 06 Feb 2010Big Pharma Digs In
Big Pharma inside the WHO
Big Pharma inside WHO III: EU Probes False Pandemic
Pharma's big ad budget
Swine flu labelled a conspiracy
Swine Flu Fraud—Official Questioning Now Starts
WHO Advisor Secretly Pads Pockets with Big Pharma Money
ITV's new chief executive, Adam Crozier, could walk away from his old job at the head of Royal Mail with £2m in bonuses. The broadcaster appointed Crozier, who has no television experience and is the second highest-paid public sector worker, to the top role after a long and occasionally tortuous 10-month search.The cheque's in the post: £2m bonus for departing Crozier
Crozier will be rewarded from a three-year bonus scheme based on efficiency targets at the postal operator, which has recently been hit by a series of national strikes over mounting workloads.
Archie Norman, ITV's chairman, said Crozier, who is the former head of the Football Association, had the "steely resolve we need at ITV", which was looking for a "great leader" ...
Guardian 28 Jan 2010Investors switch off ITV's Crozier
ITV could reward Adam Crozier with £14m pay and bonus package
From alpha mail to broadcasting mogul
Royal Mail rewarding Adam Crozier's 'failure'
Crozier's £100,000 pay rise... and his bonus is the same again
Adam on leave
Barclays' president, Bob Diamond, warned today that Barack Obama's plans to limit the size of banks would hit jobs, growth and global trade.Bob Diamond attacks Obama's banking plans
Speaking on the opening day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Diamond said the growth in "large, integrated, universal banks" had been a response to market forces in the post-communist world.
"They [the big banks] fulfilled an important function in helping governments and corporates to transfer risk, particularly across borders," Diamond added.
"Did banks get big because they wanted to or were they following their clients, their customers and the markets? Was it for an economic purpose?"
Finding a way of preventing a re-run of the 2007 financial crisis is a key theme of this year's Davos forum and has been given added impetus by last week's White House announcement that the US would put restrictions on the size and the activities of Wall Street banks.
Diamond said there had been the failure of a "couple of banks" caused by poor regulation and ineffective management, particularly around management of risk ...
Guardian 27 Jan 2010Bank of England backs Obama's banking reforms
Wall Street's $26m lobbyists gear up to fight Obama banks reform
Obama pushes new bank regulation
President Obama's banking speech
Investment bankers, lawyers, accountants and PR advisers racked up fees at a rate of more than £2m a day during the acrimonious £12bn battle for control of Cadbury in the latest sign that it is business as usual in the City ...£2m a day cost of Cadbury deal – plus £12m for the boss
Bonanza for banks and lawyers involved in deal as company warns of job cuts
The robust defence mounted by Stitzer and Carr, makes job offers from Kraft's boss, Irene Rosenfeld, unlikely. If Stitzer leaves, he will be entitled to a bumper payoff comprising a year's salary, in his case £985,000, a bonus worth almost £2m and the right to cash in cheap and free shares worth £8.6m.
He also owns a personal stake in the company worth £5.5m, according to its most recent annual report. After more than 25 years at the firm, 56-year-old Stitzer is also sitting on a £15m pension pot that promises to pay out £1.5m a year when he retires.
The demise of Cadbury as a flag carrier for corporate Britain prompted fears that thousands of jobs are now at risk. Cadbury ... employs 6,000 people in the UK, and unions are worried that jobs will be lost as Kraft wants to cut annual running costs by $675m (£413m) after the takeover, which is being funded with £7bn of debt.
Unite national officer Jennie Formby said ... "This is a leveraged bid and Kraft will eventually have to repay the debt, meaning a great deal of uncertainty for the workforce in the UK and Ireland." ...
Guardian 20 Jan 2010The sad lesson of Cadbury is the City still holds the whip
Mergers and acquisitions
Private Equity
A film released this week in Britain recounts the 16-year battle by Ecuadorians for damages against Chevron for oil pollution.Who will pay for Amazon's 'Chernobyl'?
It's barely eight in the morning and already the dusty oil town of Lago Agrio, on the fringes of the Ecuadorian Amazon, is sweltering.
Its name means "sour lake" in Spanish, after the hometown of Texan oil company Texaco – a fitting name for an area of once-pristine rainforest that has been decimated in the pursuit of oil.
So severe is the environmental damage here that experts have called it an "Amazon Chernobyl" ...
Crude ... began when Steve Donziger, a lawyer acting for the Ecuadorians, arrived at the film-maker's office.
"The story the lawyer told me was indeed shocking," said Berlinger.
In the words of the film's producers, the claim was "that from the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, Texaco (now Chevron) dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic waste and formation water directly into streams, rivers, and the jungle floor; that nearly 18 millions of crude oil was spilled and leaked from pipelines, that more than 235 billion cubic feet of natural gas was burned into the atmosphere, and that nearly 1,000 unlined toxic waste pits were built throughout the region." ...
Independent 10 Jan 2010Crude
The Real Price of Oil
Chevron Corporation
If there is one single force responsible for the regrettable soaring of boardroom pay over the past two decades, it is the insidious rise and rise of the remuneration consultant ...Put paid to pay consultants
Now no blue-chip company would dream of creating a chief executive’s pay packet without drafting in consultants, usually two or three different firms for different elements of the package ...
All burble on dutifully about the importance of aligning the long-term interests of shareholders with those of management.
All insist their complex systems of targets, benchmarks, hurdles and option formulae achieve this.
Yet long-run share returns have for years moved in precisely the opposite direction to top pay. Packages of £1 million, £2 million and £3 million are now common: the average FTSE 100 chief executive earns 128 times as much as his average employee; the ratio a decade ago was 47 times.
Meanwhile, long-run share returns have collapsed and are at their lowest for two decades.
Something isn’t working. The problem is that these consultants are usually hired — directly or indirectly — by the very people whose pay they are helping to set. The incentive to structure overgenerous schemes is obvious: that way you get hired again and also win mandates from other executives who would like to be similarly rewarded ...
Times 09 Jan 2010 Wealth Log
Nortel and Ernst & Young abuse of workers rights is wrong
On Monday 30 March 2009, 228 employees at Nortel plants in Monkstown in Newtownabbey, Maidenhead and Harlow were called to a meeting and summarily dismissed without notice or redundancy pay.
The redundancy treatment of Nortel staff employed in Northern Ireland has been described by the SDLP’s Alasdair McDonnell as a betrayal of massive proportions.
“There are fundamental questions that need to be asked and answered about the actions of both Nortel and Ernest & Young in their treatment of these dismissed employees and that is why we called this meeting today.
“We want to know why, despite repeated public assurances given by Ernst and Young when Nortel went into administration in January that it would be “business as usual”, promises that contracts would be honoured have been broken.
“We want to know why Ernest & Young clearly failed to comply with the required minimum consultation period of 90 days with employees.
“And we want to know why Ernest & Young agreed to pay a £15.5m bonus package for Nortel Executives on 20th March and then took a decision 10 days later to make 228 employees redundant at no notice with no redundancy pay”.
ipetitions.comShame on You Nortel
City bankers 'regularly offer prostitutes to clients'
City bankers entertain clients and try to generate business by offering trips to brothels, MPs heard today.
Kat Banyard of gender-equality pressure group the Fawcett Society told a Treasury select committee hearing into women's role in the City of London that there was a growing trend in the City to use prostitution to entertain clients.
"We took extensive evidence from individual women who said it was becoming frequent for meetings to be held in lap dance clubs, and I also had women speak to me and say that prostitution was being used in client deals or in ways to generate business – and that all of this culture created a very hostile environment, as you would expect, for female employees of those firms," she said.
One former City worker who gave evidence to the Fawcett Society said that while working for a top international investment bank in the City, she witnessed a senior manager looking for a brothel to entertain some Russian clients.
"I was out drinking with some guys in my team when a very senior guy came over," she said. "He asked if anyone knew of a good brothel in Edinburgh. He said he had some Russian clients coming over and he wanted them to sign a multimillion-pound deal." ...
Former Bank of England policymaker Charles Goodhart, who is now professor emeritus of banking and finance at the London School of Economics, told the committee that the worst financial crisis since the second world war could have been prevented if more women were on the boards of major companies. "Women tend to be more cautious and have a longer term outlook. I think that men can be more aggressive and prepared to take larger risks," he said. "There would have been less likelihood of the financial crisis if we had a larger number of female chief executives in the financial sector."
He said that there were "remarkably few" female chief executives in the financial sector and that it is "a great pity".
"I think that the longer term and cautious tendency that women have and less of the alpha male would be beneficial."
Nichola Pease, who runs the fund manager JO Hambro, told the committee that equality legislation in Britain was preventing women from getting the top jobs in the City. She said that many firms were scared of hiring women because penalties for successful sex discrimination claims were unlimited. Another factor that put companies off employing women was that women in the UK could take up to 52 weeks of maternity leave, compared with just 12 weeks in the US.
"A year's maternity leave is too long, and sex discrimination claims that run into 10s of millions of pounds are ridiculous," she told the committee.
Guardian 14 October 2009Rescued bank's traders scoop £1.8bn bonuses
Goldman Sachs on track to pay out record $22bn as profits jump to $3.19bn
A year after the crunch, it's boom time again for bankers
Goldman Sachs poised to inflame row on bankers' pay
JPMorgan heralds return to bumper bonuses
Building companies fined £129.5m
Some of the UK's leading building companies have been handed big fines by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) for rigging bids for contracts.
The OFT has fined a total of 103 firms £129.5m for colluding with competitors on building contracts.
It said the firms colluded among themselves during the bidding process, leading to customers, such as local authorities, having to pay too much.
The ruling comes at the end of a five-year investigation by the OFT ...
BBC NEWS 22 September 2009
How UK oil company Trafigura tried to cover up African pollution disaster
The British oil trader Trafigura has offered to pay out in a historic damages claim from 31,000 Africans injured by the dumping of toxic waste in one of the worst pollution disasters in recent history, the Guardian can reveal.
The compensation deal for the victims of toxic oil waste dumping in west Africa – likely to be confirmed imminently – means the full extent of attempts to cover up what really happened can be spelled out for the first time.
The truth is laid bare in Trafigura's hitherto secret documents, published by the Guardian today.
The company's internal emails show the true nature of the toxic waste dumped around Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast. Trafigura had publicly claimed the waste was harmless.
The exposure of the company files has contributed to Trafigura's climbdown after three years of bitterly contested legal battles. We are publishing them online today.
Martyn Day is a senior partner at the British law firm Leigh Day, which has brought one of the biggest group actions in legal history, seeking damages of £100m.
He said today in Abidjan, where he has been negotiating the settlement: "The claimants are very pleased." ...
Guardian 16 September 2009Firm agrees Ivorian waste payouts
Secret Trafigura report
Trafigura offers £1,000 each to toxic dumping victims
Ivory Coast deal is 'not enough'
Trafigura knew of waste dangers
The Trafigura files
Amnesty attacks oil industry
More
Big men, bankers and the stench of corruption
Frederick Chiluba is a sharp dresser. The one-time bus conductor who rose to become President of Zambia has a fondness for expensive designer suits, his monogrammed shirts set off by matching silk ties and handkerchiefs. While the majority of his fellow countrymen struggled to survive on less than a dollar a day, he would think nothing of jetting off to Geneva and dropping £300,000 in his favourite clothes shop ...
The post-colonial history of Africa is pockmarked by corruption. According to the United Nations, political and business leaders steal more than £90bn a year, much of it siphoned into Western bank accounts, businesses and properties. When President Sani Abacha of Nigeria died, he had stashed at least £2.5bn into banks dotted around the globe.
A sizeable chunk was found in 23 banks in London. The names of the institutions involved read like a roll-call of blue-chips, including Barclays, Merrill Lynch, National Westminster and Royal Bank of Scotland ...
When occasionally the lid is lifted on these dealings, the stench is overpowering.
Five years ago Riggs Bank, a venerable American institution that once employed Abraham Lincoln, collapsed after a Senate probe uncovered its relaxed approach to funds held there by the likes of President Obiang and General Pinochet. The inquiry even turned up an obsequious letter from a bank official to Obiang, perhaps the vilest despot in Africa, which "thanked the president for his establishment of several bank accounts, and encouraged a working relationship to help establish and secure the stable reign of his country".
Our public officials are little better.
When the newly elected government of Nigeria tried to get back the money looted by Abacha, the British government hindered its recovery. (The Swiss went even further, attempting to hold on to the money despite court rulings insisting on its repatriation).
Earlier this year, the Serious Fraud Office suspended a belated investigation into the Anglo-Leasing heist, blaming lack of help from the Kenyan authorities. And most shamefully of all, when our man in Nairobi publicly condemned this huge fraud, he ran into heavy flak in Whitehall.
If we are serious about fighting poverty, we need to do much more ...
Independent 18 August 2009'Shopaholic' ex-president of Zambia cleared of corruption
Vulture fund swoops on Congo over $100m debt
The government of the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo is racking up fines of $20,000 a week in a case brought by a New York-based vulture fund over a debt incurred from Tito's Yugoslavia in the 1980s. ...
A Washington Court handed down a penalty against the DRC in March, starting at $5,000 a week and eventually rising to $80,000, for failing to comply with a demand to provide detailed information about all its assets throughout the world.
The fine is the latest twist in the long-running effort by investment fund FG Hemisphere to collect a debt first incurred 20 years ago, when the notorious dictator Mobutu Sese Seko was in power in the DRC. The debt now amounts to $100m, including interest and penalties.
Lawyers for the African country have lodged an objection to the penalty, on the grounds that the district court has no jurisdiction over a sovereign state; but Stephen Cundra, of law firm Roetzel and Andress, who is representing the DRC, said no ruling has so far been handed down on whether the fine must stand.
"Eight million people have died in the Congo for lack of healthcare... and the last thing they can do is find $100m for a vulture fund," Cundra said.
As well as a series of moves to take control of the DRC's assets in Washington, the fund has also taken action in Hong Kong and South Africa ...
At least 54 companies are known to have taken legal action against 12 of the world's poorest countries in recent years, for claims amounting to over $1.8bn (£1.2bn).
Observer 09 August 2009
Mineral firms 'fuel Congo unrest'
Western mineral firms are fuelling violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo by failing to check where their raw materials come from, activists say.
Global Witness says companies sourcing minerals used in electronic gadgets are buying them from traders who finance rebel and government troops.
It calls for the UK-based Amalgamated Metal Corporation (AMC) and others to have assets frozen over the issue ...
"Global Witness is calling on the UK government to request that the UN Sanctions Committee add the UK-based entities of AMC and their directors to the list of companies and individuals against whom sanctions should be imposed," the group said.
It quoted a UN resolution as saying that anyone supporting illegal Congolese armed groups through illicit trade of natural resources should be subjected to sanctions including travel restrictions and an assets freeze ...
BBC NEWS 21 July 2009Q&A: DR Congo conflict
Global Witness
Inquiry into private firm's cash lure for jobseekers
Ministers launched an urgent inquiry last night after investigations by the Observer revealed that a private company being paid by the government to find jobs for the unemployed had offered £100 cash gifts to sign up people who had already found work.
The inquiry into Triage Central, a major Scottish employment company, came amid a chorus of demands from senior politicians for the police to examine mounting evidence of malpractice at the heart of the government's welfare policy.
The Department for Work and Pensions said last night it was "extremely concerned" about the way Triage Central - a key player in its Pathways to Work policy which aims to get claimants off incapacity benefit - had tried to enlist people who already had jobs onto its books. The revelation will prompt suspicions that companies are claiming government success fees for getting people into work, when in fact they have played no such role ...
The Observer revealed last week how staff of at least two private recruitment companies had deliberately inflated the number of people they had got back to work, apparently to maximise their "success rates". Further cases have since come to light but so far investigations have only been carried out by the DWP and the companies themselves ...
Pathways to Work was billed as a bold attempt to tackle the biggest challenge in welfare reform - helping move up to 2.6m incapacity benefit claimants into work. It was running 73% short of its target in January this year, according to official figures.
Overall, the private sector-led programmes had delivered 60% of the expected number of jobs in the six months to September 2008, while using 98% of the expected expenditure ...
Observer 05 July 2009
Tesco chief takes flak from both unions and investors at fiery AGM
Tesco came under fire from both investors and union leaders at a fiery annual general meeting in Glasgow today, with changes to the retailer's share option scheme attracting one of the biggest protest votes the City has seen.
Investors have become increasingly militant since it became clear the City "bonus culture" was partly to blame for the financial crisis, with the current AGM season filled with challenges over executive pay.
Tesco's desire to extend the period during which leaving or retiring executives can exercise their share options from one to three years met with only narrow approval, with 45% of its shareholders either rejecting or abstaining over the plan. In City terms, anything over 10% against is considered significant, even if that disapproval is registered as an abstention.
A resolution requisitioned by Unite, Britain's largest union, demanding better conditions for agency workers in the meat factories that supply Tesco, also won considerable backing, with 18% of shareholders showing their support. Within that figure, 11% of shareholders voted in its favour – more than double Unite's expectations – while a further 7% abstained, which the union also counted as its own. The special resolution required a 75% vote in its favour to be carried ...
Guardian 03 July 2009
Tesco 'breaking promise' to South African fruit pickers
Anti-poverty campaigners have accused Tesco of breaking a pledge to improve the pay and working conditions of South African fruit pickers who have helped the retail giant to record annual profits of more than £3bn.
Three years ago the company agreed to look at the plight of the workers – predominantly women – who are at the bottom of Tesco's lengthy but highly profitable fruit supply chain, after embarrassing scrutiny of its overseas labour practices.
But interviews by the Guardian with female workers on Tesco supplier farms near Cape Town reveal they are still only being paid South Africa's "minimum" rather than a "living" wage – which they complain leaves them barely enough to feed and clothe their children. Those interviewed are receiving just 1,231 rand, equivalent to £97.90, per month.
Under the UK's Ethical Trading Initiative, which Tesco is signed up to, the supermarket agreed to ensure that "living wages are paid" and "wages should always be enough to meet basic needs and to provide some discretionary income".
Simon McRae, senior campaigns officer at the anti-poverty charity War on Want, said: "For years Tesco has promised that its suppliers' workers will earn a living wage. But while Tesco is breaking records with £3bn profits, workers picking its fruit are worse off amid inflation on far less than a living wage. Now the British government must act to stop this abuse." ...
Guardian 16 May 2009Tesco rocked by shareholders' revolt
Tesco
Ethical business
Sourcewatch
Trafigura: Ivory Coast toxic waste
Tonight, two years after Newsnight began investigating the toxic waste scandal in Ivory Coast, we can finally tell you just what it was that tipped on the streets and in the waterways of Abidjan, its biggest city. Tens of thousands of people fell sick and 16 died in the aftermath of the dumping.
The company which owned the waste, a giant oil trading operation called Trafigura, has always denied any wrongdoing, assuring this programme that its waste was "smelly...not dangerous." But we have seen an official analysis into the waste carried out by the authorities in Amsterdam where Trafigura had first tried to offload the waste.
The analysis lists a chemical cocktail that is most certainly dangerous. We consulted an independent toxicologist who told us if the stuff had been tipped in London, millions would be sick and the smell would be detectable as far as the M25 ring.
Trafigura is being prosecuted in Amsterdam. Court action is also starting in London, where 30,000 Abidjanis are suing the company for damages. We will bring you the latest on this story, from Abidjan and Amsterdam.
We can also reveal allegations of witness nobbling, some of the key claimants say attempts were made to get them to change their statements ...
BBC Newsnight 13 May 2009Dirty tricks and toxic waste in Ivory Coast
'Dirty tricks' over toxic waste
People would fall sick for miles around
Company defends toxic dumping claims
Ivory Coast toxic waste claims
Greenpeace condemns ... deal
Ivory Coast gets £100m
Ivory Coast waste 'was not toxic'
Monsanto and industrial agriculture's darkening shadow over our food
OpEdNews 14 January 2009FOOD SAFETY REGULATIONS -
OpEdNews 08 January 2009
the intended QUICKSAND now taking under all sustainable agricultureAg Secretary Tom Vilsack: Too much Monsanto in the Mix?
OpEdNews 17 December 2008The SCAM behind NAIS
OpEdNews 30 November 2008Stop the NAIS
LewRockwell.com 30 May 2006Henry Kissinger's 1974 Plan for Food Control Genocide
Schiller Institute 08 December 1995
Primark in storm over conditions at UK supplier
Britain's high street fashion giant Primark was at the centre of a storm last night over allegations that illegal immigrants paid just over half the minimum wage had been employed to make fashionable knitwear for one of the firm's bestselling ranges ...
The workers, caught by an undercover journalist on a hidden camera, were allegedly being paid £3 an hour - just over half the minimum wage of £5.73 - for 12-hour days, seven days a week. Many of the garments made by the Pakistanis, Afghans and Indians over the past five months had ended up two miles away in one of the retail giant's largest and most profitable stores in Manchester's bustling Market Street ...
Employees at both TNS and Fashion Waves were caught on film admitting their illegal status in the UK. One Pakistani working on a Primark order tells how his visa had run out eight years ago, yet he had remained in Britain working under the radar of the authorities.
Working conditions inside both TNS and Fashion Waves were also exposed as cramped and cold, in breach of health and safety regulations.
Most dramatically, the undercover journalist working at both units captures cash-in-hand payments being made to her for gruelling hours. The money, apparently paid without the knowledge of the taxman, amounts to about £3.50 an hour, £2.20 less than the minimum wage.
TNS Knitwear denies the allegations, and there was no comment from Fashion Waves ...
The Observer 11 January 2009
Shell’s Game
I asked Mr van der Veer a simple question - fifteen times ... “What is the value of your annual investments in renewable energy?”. He waffled, changed the subject, admitted that he knew the figure, then flatly refused to reveal it. Nor could he give me a convincing explanation of why he wouldn’t tell me, claiming only that “those figures are misused and people say it is too small” and it “is not the right message to give to the people”.
It strikes me that there is only one likely reason for these evasions: that Shell’s spending on renewables has fallen sharply from the figure it announced in 2000. It’s a fair guess that the current investment would look microscopic by comparison to its spending on the Canadian tar sands, and would make a mockery of its new round of advertising. I challenge Shell - for the 16th time - to prove me wrong ...
Monbiot.com 06 January 2009
The cursed children of Bhopal
She has no proof. She cannot know for sure. But when Niello Far's daughter was born deaf, she immediately suspected what might have been the cause. "Everybody believes it was the gas. Others have told me it is because of the gas," said the young mother, making sign language to her four-year-old, Zoba. "The doctor has told me that it may be, that it might be the gas."
When people in Bhopal talk of the gas they are referring to the 40 tonnes of toxic chemicals that poured into the sky from an insecticide factory in the early hours of 3 December 1984, wreaking deadly havoc.
Up to 8,000 people died in the immediate aftermath, perhaps two and half times that in the subsequent months. But now, almost a quarter-century after the world's worst industrial accident, campaigners are fighting to help a "second generation" of suffering Bhopalis who they say are victims of contaminated water and political and corporate neglect. ...
The Independent 19 October 2008
International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal
What happened in Bhopal Wikipedia
Rent back deals 'need firm rules'
Tighter regulation is needed of firms offering sale and rent back deals to struggling homeowners, according to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT).
Under these deals, people struggling to pay their mortgage sell their home at a discount to firms who let them stay on in the property as tenants.
But an OFT report found that this was not the best option for some, and others were quickly evicted.
It wants the estimated 1,000-plus firms involved to be more transparent.
An unknown number of amateur landlords are also involved in the relatively new industry.
The OFT said that about 50,000 transactions of this kind have already taken place ...
BBC NEWS 14 October 2008
Starbucks 'wastes 23 million litres of water each day'
The bizarre policy, which is aimed at preventing germs developing in the taps in its 10,000 stores worldwide, has outraged environmental groups.
Every Starbucks branch has a cold tap behind the counter providing water for a sink called a "dipper well" used for washing spoons and utensils and the staff are banned from turning the water off under "health and safety rules", an investigation claims.
In a letter to a customer who complained about the waste, a Starbucks executive revealed that a constant flow stops breeding in the taps.
It means that 23.4 million litres of water - enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool every 83 minutes or sustain the population of drought-hit Namibia - is wasted every day.
In the UK alone, where there are 698 branches open for 13 hours a day, it counts for around 1.63 million litres of water wasted. ...
Telegraph 06 October 2008 Global Water
Sulston argues for open medicine
" ... current systems place the needs of shareholders ahead of the needs of patients ... "
A Nobel Prize-winning scientist has hit out at what he terms the "moral corruption" of the medical industry.
Britain's Sir John Sulston says that profits are taking precedence over the needs of patients, particularly in the developing world.
He was speaking at the launch of a new research institute into science, ethics and innovation.
Sir John shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for medicine for his work on the genetics controlling cell division.
He is well known for his commitment to public medicine and his opposition to the privatisation of scientific information.
Eight years ago he led the fight to keep the data being derived from the Human Genome Project open and free to any scientist who wanted to use it.
He says there is now great concern among researchers about private companies patenting genes and genetic tests. He is also concerned about the misuse of information, and what he terms "disease mongering".
He is taking these concerns over the direction that science and medicine are going in, onto a broader stage.
Sir John is to be the chairman of a new UK-based institute that will research the ethical questions raised by science and innovation.
He wants the group to try to provide ground rules and guidance on issues such as the patenting of genes, and how people in developing countries have fair access to medicines.
Sir John believes that our current systems place the needs of shareholders ahead of the needs of patients. ...
BBC NEWS 04 July 2008Medical chief's bonus 'an insult'
Kickbacks, cartels and chatrooms
Drugs giant faces criminal charges over clinical trial
Call to prosecute BT for ad trial
BT should face prosecution for its "illegal" trials of a controversial ad-serving technology, a leading computer security researcher has said.
Dr Richard Clayton at the University of Cambridge made his comments after reviewing a leaked BT internal report.
The document reveals details of a 2006 BT trial with the Phorm system, which matches adverts to users' web habits.
"It's against the law of the land," he told BBC News. "We must now expect to see a prosecution." ...
BBC NEWS 05 June 2008 More ...
UFCW Launches Campaign in Britain Against “The Two Faces of Tesco”
One of America’s biggest unions, the 1.3 million-strong United Food and Commercial Workers union, today launched a UK campaign to expose “The Two Faces of Tesco."
At a Westminster press launch chaired by Jon Cruddas MP, the union said that it is stepping up a campaign already begun in the United States to shame Tesco to talks on union recognition and employee pay and benefits.
The UFCW seeks to represent some of the lowest-paid and least secure retail workers in the USA, more than half of whom are women, and has been seeking talks with Tesco for two years since the world’s third-largest retailer announced its entry into the US grocery market. All attempts have so far fallen on deaf ears, and Tesco launched its chain of Fresh & Easy supermarkets in 2007 as non-union stores.
UFCW says that it is seeking the chance for dialogue, to build the same constructive partnership that Tesco enjoys in the UK with the shop workers’ union Usdaw, but Tesco refuses to meet. ...
UFCW 04 June 2008 Tesco's US operations under fire
Northern Rock CEO Sold Millions in Shares Before Collapse
Adam Applegarth did pretty well out of Northern Rock shares in the year before it collapsed. He has trousered many millions over the years, allowing him to enjoy an Aston Martin with a Ferrari for his missus parked in the driveway of his mansion. His confidence in his bank's business model long term is demonstrated by his selling of £1.5 m of shares in two days. (25 Jan 2006 sold 52,253 at 957p for £500,061.21 and the next day he sold another 111,426 at 957p for £1,066,346.82).
His faith in the business was shown by his purchase last April of just 262 shares worth a little under £3,000. Not a lot of faith in the business from the boss was there?
Enron's crooks were massive financial supporters of the Republican party. Northern Rock gave half-a-million to Labour's favourite think-tank, the IPPR. It also employed Gordon's personal pollster, Deborah Mattinson, as an adviser. Of all the pollsters to seek advice from, why her? Why give money to that think-tank? Nowadays it is very rare for publicly quoted companies to make politically partisan donations.
Guido Fawkes 18 November 2007The £63,000-a-month cricketer
Former Rock chief in line for £760,000
Northern Rock will make losses until 2011
Revealed: massive hole in Northern Rock's assets
Northern Rock boss sold £2.6m of shares
while urging employees to keep buying