Multilateral Banks

Próspera, a company based in the U.S. state of Delaware, has invoked an investor-state dispute settlement treaty to try to force the government of Honduras to pay US$11 billion for outlawing the company’s plan to operate a privately run city on the island of Roatán. Read More

A delegation of forest activists from Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria traveled to Zaventem, Belgium, to stage a protest in June outside the headquarters of SIAT (Societe d'Investissement pour l'Agriculture Tropicale or Investment Company for Tropical Agriculture) over landgrabbing in their communities. “Give us back our land,” they chanted. Read More

Activists are calling on the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to stop funding the $3 billion Mandalika project on the island of Lombok in Indonesia - which is led by the Vinci Group - after the United Nations released a damning report on human rights abuses at the site. 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

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

UBS, the Swiss bank, is being investigated by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission for failing to carry out adequate due diligence before working on share offerings for several Chinese companies. The bank says that it is at risk of being suspended from doing business in the city. Read More

The UK Serious Fraud Office has notched up another win in the global interest rate setting scandal by sending three Barclays traders to jail. Of the 20 bankers that have been charged to date, five have been found guilty, six have been let go while nine are to face trial. Read More

Bank of America leads the list of companies that have paid over $1 billion in penalties and fines to the U.S. government in the last six years. Violation Tracker, a new corporate misconduct database maintained by Good Jobs First, estimates that the North Carolina bank has paid $56 billion. 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

Investment Technology Group (ITG), a U.S. stock broker, paid a $20.3 million fine for running a secret operation named Project Omega to take advantage of "dark pools" trading orders made by its clients. Experts say that Barclays and Credit Suisse may also soon pay fines for dark pools trading scams. Read More