Latest on Corporate Influence and Accountability (External) - Archive

A July Report from the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) has revealed a worrying lack of proven poverty impact from the World Bank’s public-private partnerships (PPPs). This comes despite a significant increase in the Bank’s support to PPPs in the decade 2002 through 2012 and the Bank’s recent strategy, which suggests intensifying support for PPPs in the future. One key reason for the ineffectiveness of PPPs, writes Eurodad's María José Romero, has been the scant attention paid to hidden [...]

Owners of anonymous companies registered in U.S. states are ripping off innocent people and businesses across America, says a new report by Global Witness. Drawing on 22 cases involving anonymous companies from 27 states, The Great Rip Off shows how fraudsters, mobsters, money-launderers, tax-evaders and corrupt politicians are able to use anonymously-owned American companies to cover their tracks and evade the authorities.

The Danish Institute for Human Rights has published a working paper on “The State Duty to Protect Against Business-Related Human Rights Abuses”, which provides an extensive analysis of all of the guiding principles under pillars 1 (The State Duty to Protect) and 3 (Access to Remedy) of the United Nations’ Guiding Principles (UNGPs) on Human Rights and Business. The paper considers state duties and state access to remedy in the following three parts: overall issues such as the state’s approach [...]

African governments are increasingly turning to partnerships with donors and multinational companies to stimulate investment in agriculture, after decades of neglect. Such public–private partnerships (PPPs) ‘at scale’ offer the allure of increased capital and technology, rises in productivity and foreign exchange earnings.

In this briefing paper Oxfam assesses the effectiveness and potential of these mega-PPPs as a vehicle for poverty eradication and rural livelihoods. There are three simple questions to ask of these initiatives: Who primarily benefits from them? Who shoulders [...]

In a recent press release, Corporate Europe Observatory highlights the consensus of trade unions and transparency organizations around ‘the need to tackle the persistent over-representation of corporate interests in the European Commission “expert groups”’. Research shows that the dominance of business interests in the most economically and politically powerful expert groups can often have a detrimental effect on the EU decision making process – indeed corporate interests are seldom in line with public interests. A thorough review of the horizontal [...]

Public-Private-Partnerships have become a mainstream development model in recent years. On the one hand, after the financial crisis contributions from the private sector are envisaged to fill the gap of decreasing official development assistance from states. On the other hand, an increasing share of development finance is channeled to businesses and financial institutions. NGOs criticize that private sector development priorities are not aligned with national development strategies and emphasize the conflict of interests between making profits and reducing poverty and [...]

In an article on a Swiss Federal Council Report, Peter Niggli, Director of Alliance Sud, emphasizes the need for binding rules for business and human rights: "Attempts have [...] been made in the United Nations to create a globally binding set of rules for all transnational enterprises; it was successfully torpedoed by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in place since 2011 [...] call on individual States to take action [...]

While everybody on both sides of the Atlantic seems to be talking about TTIP when it comes to discussing free trade theses days, another currently negotiated agreement looms in the shadows: Like a steamroller, the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) could flatten almost every sphere of services. Under the pretext of circumventing the stalemated Doha Round of the WTO, Switzerland and 50 other mostly industrialized countries are negotiating a broad-based agreement for financial services, telecommunications, internet trade, transport by water [...]

Eurodad publishes a new report dealing with the relationship between development finance institutions (DFIs) and the private sector. Government-controlled DFIs are important players in the development arena through investing in the private sector in development countries. As the report points out, these institutions are organized as private, profit-oriented corporations facilitating an imbalance in power structures. This means that rich country governments are able to influence DFIs through shareholding, while not including recipient countries in their investment decisions. This, according to [...]

Ahead of the G7 Summit in Brussels, FIAN raises human rights concerns about the G8 New Alliance initiative

Heidelberg/Germany, Geneva/Switzerland - May 16, 2014: Two weeks before the G7 Summit of June 4, 5 in Brussels, FIAN International raises grave human rights concerns about the G8 initiative "New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa" in a policy paper published today.

Titled "G8 New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa: A Critical Analysis from a Human Rights [...]

Yesterday, a broad alliance of civil society organizations including Global Policy Forum sent an open letter to the European Commission to protest against the assessment of country by country reporting by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Since PricewaterhauseCoopers - one of the "Big Four" audit firms - is a known opponent of public country by country reporting, letting them assess this crucial tool for preventing corporate tax dodging would be the same logic as to set the fox to guard the henhouse.

More than 1 million companies are incorporated in Delaware, which is more than the actual number of living residents. That number includes 50% of all publicly-traded companies in the U.S. and 64% of the Fortune 500. This is no accident; Delaware law grants attractive tax arrangements and other measures that attract businesses to incorporate there. These measures have paid off – in 2011 alone, Delaware collected roughly $860 million in taxes and fees from these companies – about a quarter [...]

The Treaty Alliance just published a Press Release on the adoption of a resolution initiating a process to develop legally binding human rights standards for transnational corporations. The resolution sponsored by Ecuador and South Africa was adopted yesterday by the United Nations Human Rights Council after fierce negotiations. While the EU and others already expressed that they will not cooperate in the implementation of the resolution, the decision could nevertheless mean a big step towards bringing justice to the victims [...]

A broad coalition of NGOs from various countries is inviting other interested organizations, academcis and other progressive political actors to contribute to a new website on EU investment policy: EU-SecretDeals.info will publish negotiating texts from anonymous sources, and provide critical analysis of these texts. By this, they hope to enable parliamentarians, academics, civil society organisations, media and the public to understand what the EU, the US and Canada are trying to do during the negotiations.

The USA’s National Family Farm Coalition warnes that food safety as well as farmers’ livelihoods could be under threat if plans for a Transatlantic Free Trade Area were to materialise. The National Family Farm Coalition was among a wide range of civil society groups protesting against a Transatlantic Free Trade Area (TAFTA) in Arlington, USA, in May. One of the chief aspects of transatlantic negotiations is the mutual recognition by the USA and the EU of rules and regulations on [...]

ActionAid published a report “The Great Land Heist” highlighting how land grabbing in the global South undermines human rights and poverty alleviation. By giving evidence from Cambodia, Kenya, India, Mozambique, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Tanzania the report shows the negative implications of this ‘investment model’ like forced evictions, rising food insecurity, divided communities, human rights violations and increasing poverty, just to name a few. Since 2000, more than 60 million hectares have been subjected to land grabbing, according to the [...]

As the Millennium Development Goals come to a close and kick off a post-2015 debate, the role of corporations and their interests in development sector change significantly, Lora Verheecke underlines in a recently published article. While the UN supports new partnerships with the private sector and aid flows to the private sector are increasing, this has impacts on the multilateral systems and states. According to Verheecke, it is time to constrain corporations’ influence setting the development agenda and to remind [...]

UN Women launches a new Private Sector Leadership Advisory Council. The council, which is expected to offer advice to accelerate women's economic empowerment, end violence against women and help to close the funding gap for UN Women, is comprised of ten corporate executives from companies ranging from Tupperware to Chanel to Anglo American. The council is supposed to provide the foundation for further "Golden Triangle" partnerships, as they are being called, between corporations, governments and civil society. The council will [...]

The European Commission (EC) published an action plan which includes proposals to further private sector engagement in developing countries. The EC’s policy paper is an attempt to redraw European development cooperation to encourage policy change. By looking closer to the policy paper, Eurodad states that the EC misses to tackle the fact that main European impacts on private sector in developing countries are driven by European policies in other areas like trade, agriculture or tax. In doing so, the EC [...]

As food security still is a severe problem in many African countries the G8 try to tackle the issue with old wine in new bottles – industrial farming – and thereby pave the way for transnational companies, a new report by the World Development Movement states. According to the report, the New Alliance initiative by the G8 seems to be a good strategy to direct more aid money to one of the most pressing problems in Africa but in reality [...]

Melinda Gates, Co-Chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, addressed as a keynote speaker the 67th World Health Assembly on May 20, 2014. Civil Society Organizations like the Peoples' Health Movement and Third World Network express their strong protest against the decision of the World Health Organisation (WHO) to invite her. According to undersigned organizations, inter alia Ms. Gates’ credentials as a leader in public health are unclear. In addition, more worth knowing is that the private organization, which [...]

A new article, published in Rural21 - the International Journal for Rural Development, deals with new data information systems introduced by seed companies Monsanto and DuPont in the USA. Author Mike Gardner indicates that American farmers are on alert due to new data services. It is not just that the new technology collects and stores information from farmers, but it also uploads data to seed providers. Seed giants like Monsanto can use these data for analyzing and optimizing their planting [...]

On May 2nd Oxfam released the report ‘Business among Friends’ critically assessing the OECD-led ‘Action Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting’ (BEPS). The negative implications of tax evasion and profit shifting for development are increasingly acknowledged among political leaders and international organizations. The amount that governments in the Global South lose annually due to illicit financial transfers but also legal means of tax evasion easily outnumbers the amount they receive in form of Official Development Aid (ODA). Nevertheless, developing [...]

A new brochure by ETO Consortium reacts to the considerable urgency to strengthen Extraterritorial Obligations by States (ETOs) and implement the primacy of human rights in the middle of diverse and global crises. On the basis of its mandate, the ETO Consortium deals with economic, social and cultural rights and uses the Maastricht Principles on States’ extraterritorial obligations as its key term of reference. Just as the Maastricht Principles carry the spirit of indivisibility of human rights, so do the [...]

Since the economic crisis hit Europe, international investors have begun suing EU countries struggling under austerity and recession for a loss of expected profits, using international trade and investment agreements. This is revealed by a new report released today by the Transnational Institute and Corporate Europe Observatory. The investors – and the lawyers involved – are scavenging for profits amidst crisis-hit nations, providing a salutary warning of the potential high costsof the proposed trade deal between the US and the [...]