Global Trade

Vietnam has asked Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Corporation to pay $500 million in compensation for dumping toxic waste in Ky Anh that resulted in a massive fish kill on a 120 mile stretch of Vietnam's central coast in the provinces of Ha Tinh, Hue, Quang Binh and Quang Tri. Read More

Activists have condemned Credit Suisse and VTB of Russia for lending $850 million to Mozambique in 2013 that was used mostly to buy military equipment, despite telling the public that the money would be used to buy fishing boats. Read More

The South African government has intervened to support the Indian-born Gupta brothers, owners of a sprawling conglomerate with interests from mining to media, following a scandal that suggested that the brothers had accumulated so much power that they could dictate cabinet-level decisions in the country. Read More

Did a few individual traders in London conspire to rig global interest rates in order to enrich themselves or were they just pawns in an ongoing conspiracy by major banks designed to routinely skim billions from the international financial system? Read More

The World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) has ordered the government of Venezuela to pay US$1.386 billion to Crystallex, a bankrupt Canadian gold mining company, for canceling a 2002 permit to mine for gold in the Imataca Forest Reserve Read More

Unaoil, a lobbying firm based in Monaco, is being investigated by authorities in Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. for allegedly helping companies around the world pay bribes for oil concessions and contracts. Among the companies under scrutiny is Texas-based Kellogg Brown & Root, former subsidiary of Halliburton. Read More

A new report on garment factories in Burma issued by Action Labor Rights (ALR) estimates that nearly a third of workers were required to work 60 hours or more a week, with almost two thirds reporting that they had no choice in the matter. Read More

Activists say fines paid by Volkswagen to settle the "Dieselgate" scandal should be paid into a fund to help vulnerable populations like school children and low income communities, as punishment for installing software in some 11 million vehicles to enable the cars to cheat on emissions tests. Read More

Thales, the French aerospace company, is hoping to develop a weaponized version of the Watchkeeper drone to sell to Poland. This is despite a series of software glitches and accidents that resulted in many of the first 54 Watchkeepers that were delivered to the UK to be sitting idle. Read More

British regulators are investigating Soma Oil & Gas, a UK-based company, for allegedly paying bribes to the Somali government in exchange for exploration rights. Under scrutiny is the payment of $580,000 for "capacity building arrangements" at the Ministry of Petroleum in Mogadishu, according to Financial Times sources. Read More