Privatization & Procurement

Tourist visits to the ruins of Machu Picchu, a historic Inca city in the Andes, are a major source of income for Peru. After the government turned over sales of entrance tickets to the site to Joinnus, a private company, an indefinite general strike was declared by local business owners, residents and travel unions. After a week long blockade, the government canceled the privatization. Read More

In the 1980s, the UK government deregulated and privatized bus systems all over the country under a belief that greater competition would introduce greater efficiency. However the opposite happened - prices rose and service quality declined. Read More

Boipeba, an idyllic island in Bahia state, has some of Brazil’s most beautiful beaches. Mangaba Cultivo de Coco bought up a fifth of the island to turn it into a hotel resort threatening the local traditional community and ecology. Read More

IT services provider Fujitsu supplied faulty Horizon accounting software to the UK Post Office in 1999. Over 700 UK Post Office staff were prosecuted for allegedly stealing thousands of pounds sterling. Some committed suicide, others went to jail. Read More

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

“It was a tragedy, a real tragedy,” José Luiz Garcia, whose aunt was one of the few that survived the COVID-19 outbreak at a DomusVi care home in Alcoi, Spain, told CorpWatch. “This is the highest rate of deaths that we are aware of in all of Europe.” Read More

Energy poverty – the lack of access to basic electricity and fuel – became a fashionable topic after the term was coined in the 1990s. So, when Universidad Pontificia Comillas, a university in Madrid, Spain, launched a Department of Energy and Poverty in 2018, it was seen as a bold initiative.  Read More

When Hurricane Fiona, a Category One storm, hit Puerto Rico last September, all three million people on the island were plunged into darkness. Members of the U.S. Congress questioned why LUMA Energy, the company that was awarded the power system management contract in 2020, was unable to cope. Read More

Morgan Simon, a social justice activist, wrote several articles about how CoreCivic, which operates prisons and immigration detention centres, was profiting off the policy of the Trump administration of separating migrant children from their parents. CoreCivic sued Simon for $60 million but a U.S. judge in California ruled in Simon’s favor. Read More

COVID-19 mortality rates at eldercare homes in Madrid managed by private companies DomusVi and Orpea were close to double that of eldercare homes in public hands during the first wave of the pandemic, as illustrated in a new map published by CorpWatch. Read More