Gulliver

Solvay is a chemicals and plastics company headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. It was founded in 1863 by Ernest Solvay to make sodium bicarbonate from limestone and salt water. The company’s factories have polluted waterways such as the groundwater wells in Spinetta Marengo, Italy, and the Delaware River in Paulsboro, New Jersey. In 2005, an Italian lab worker named Pietro Mancini discovered that the company had covered up evidence of cancer-causing hexavalent chromium leaking into the Spinetta Marengo water supply from one of their industrial facilities which manufactured resins for paints and plastics. Similar evidence was found by Delaware Riverkeeper Network in New Jersey in 2013 that Solvay’s plants had been leaking PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ into the local drinking water system.

Sony is one of the world's biggest consumer electronics and entertainment companies. Founded in 1946, it parlayed its success with floppy disks, compact discs, the Walkman, and the Playstation into Hollywood with the purchase of Columbia Pictures in 1989. Its music division has come under flak for 'payola' - bribing radio stations to buy airtime for its artists - and its film division for publishing fake reviews by 'critic' David Manning to boost unpopular films in 2001. In 2005, it paid New York state $10 million to close an investigation by Eliot Spitzer, then state attorney general, into lavish gifts, free trips and other giveaways to media executives.
 

Southern Company is the second largest utility company in the U.S. Its subsidiaries Alabama Power, Georgia Power and Mississippi Power are effectively electricity monopolies in their respective states. The company is one of the largest secret funders of climate disinformation, spending at least $62 million on climate change deniers between 1993 and 2004, almost twice as much as the $33 million that Exxon spent in the same time period. For example, it paid for research conducted by Willie Soon, a climate change denier at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Tax payers and rate payers had to foot a $7.5 billion bill for the failure of Southern Company’s so-called “clean coal” carbon-capture Kemper project in Mississippi that was never completed because the technology did not work. Southern also has a history of fighting solar power. In 2013, the company levied a $5 monthly fee per kilowatt hour on any customer who generated solar power in Alabama, effectively killing off the industry in the state.

Spire Healthcare is one of the UK’s biggest private healthcare providers. Founded in 2007 by a private equity firm, it has profited heavily off the gradual privatization of the UK's National Heath Service. During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, Spire Healthcare, alongside other private healthcare providers, was criticized for charging the taxpayer huge sums to take advantage of the backlog in demand for healthcare services.

Since 2017, the company was forced to set aside £50 million (US$ 61.45 million) to compensate victims of breast surgeon Ian Paterson who conducted unnecessary and damaging operations on over 1,000 patients. According to an independent inquiry, medical colleagues had been voicing concerns about the Paterson since 2003 but he wasn’t suspended until 2011 after 14 years of problematic work. Two Spire orthopaedic surgeons at Spire's hospital in Solihull, West Midlands, have also been investigated for conducting unnecessary and damaging operations.