Energy, Mining & Utilities

Pascoe Sabido, a campaigner with Corporate Europe Observatory,* speaks by video with CorpWatch about the annual meeting of the countries that have ratified the United Nations Climate Change Convention that is currently taking place in Glasgow, Scotland. Read More

Roberto David Castillo, former CEO of Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima (DESA) in the Honduras, has been convicted of the murder of Berta Cáceres, an activist who was fighting the Agua Zarca dam on the territory of the indigenous Lenca people, five years after she was killed in March 2016. Read More

A storm is brewing over the coal mines and power plants operated by Polska Grupa Energetyczna (PGE) in Poland – notably over the Turów complex in Lower Silesia, close to the border of the Czech republic and Germany, as well as over the Bełchatów complex in the Łódź region. Read More

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) suspended a partnership with GeoPark, a Chilean oil drilling company, barely a week after signing the agreement, handing an important victory to the Siona indigenous community who oppose the company's prospecting for oil on their lands along the Putumayo river in southern Colombia. Read More

South African prosecutors seized luxury property and vehicles worth some 1.4 billion South African rand ($96.8 million) in early May from contractors and former officials at Eskom, South Africa's state-owned power utility, as they ramped up criminal proceedings over alleged corruption in construction orders for the Kusile Power Station. Read More

Fortescue Metals Group, an iron ore mining company based in Perth, Western Australia, withheld $1.9 million in royalty payments from the Wintawari Guruma aboriginal peoples after the indigenous community asked the company to provide details of extraction plans on their traditional lands that contain many sacred cultural sites. Read More

Cricket – easily India’s favorite sport with over 760 million viewers tuning into televised matches every year – is always a major event across the subcontinent. So after the coronavirus pandemic shut down major sporting events, the Indian national team’s first international match in Sydney, Australia, was a momentous occasion. Read More

The Cotacachi indigenous community is suing ENAMI EP, Ecuador’s national mining company, and Cornerstone Capital Resources, of Ottawa, Canada, over Río Magdalena, a proposed copper-gold mining project in Los Cedros Protected Forest in the Llurimagua area of Ecuador. Read More

The Juukan Gorge, a 46,000 year-old sacred Aboriginal site in the Pilbara region of Western Australia was blown up by Rio Tinto, the world’s second largest mining company, in a quest for iron ore, despite the fact that company executives were aware of the site’s significance to local indigenous communities. Read More

A Brazilian judge has ordered Vale to compensate families of some 300 people killed at the company’s Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine when a dam built to hold waste collapsed on January 25, 2019, near the town of Brumadinho in the state of Minas Gerais. Read More