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Shareholders have demanded that the CEO of Soco International be fired after handwritten receipts for $42,250 in alleged bribes to Congolese army officials were published by Global Witness. At the time, the UK company was exploring for oil in Virunga, a United Nations World Heritage site in eastern Congo.

An Indian fishing community is suing the World Bank in Washington DC over the environmental damage caused by a coal powered plant owned by Tata Power, the largest electricity company in India. The 4,150 megawatt plant is located in the port city of Mundra in Gujarat state.

British Petroleum (BP) has been sued by some 25,000 Mexican fishing businesses over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The company says it has paid $1.8 billion in compensation to U.S. businesses but has yet to offer money to those affected south of the border.

Paladin Energy, an Australian mining company, has been accused of discharging uranium-contaminated sludge into Lake Malawi, which supports 1.7 million people in three countries - Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania. The company began uranium mining operations in Malawi in 2009 although it suspended operations last year after ore prices fell.

Major energy companies have effectively created a secret law firm of conservative attorneys general to persuade Washington lawmakers to gut environmental regulations, according to an investigation by the New York Times. In return, these senior government officials have received millions of dollars to help them win political campaigns.

Adani Enterprises has been offered a $1 billion loan by the State Bank of India to support a mega coal mining project in the Galilee basin in central Queensland, Australia. Environmentalists say that the accompanying industrialization is likely to severely impact the Great Barrier Reef, 400 kilometres away.

Two senior Tanzanian officials were arrested after they failed to produce details of 26 multi-billion dollar agreements signed with Statoil of Norway; the BG Group and Ophir from the UK; and ExxonMobil from the U.S. Opposition politicians want assurances that the money will be spent in a transparent manner.

The Dutch Supreme Court recently upheld an arbitration tribunal judgment requiring the Ecuadorean government to pay Chevron $106 million for breach of contract. Ironically, activists say Ecuador is now free to hand this money to indigenous communities who have sued the oil giant for pollution in an unrelated case.

Kashagan, Kazakhstan's flagship offshore oil project in the Caspian Sea, will need to spend some $4 billion to repair 200 kilometres of pipelines that are leaking corrosive sulphur-containing gas, according to new estimates. The reports confirm long standing fears of environmental organizations and the local community.

Kosmos Energy, a Texas oil company, is preparing to drill for oil in Western Sahara, a disputed territory currently controlled by Morocco. The company has dispatched a state of the art oil rig to begin operations later this year, according to Western Sahara Resource Watch (WSRW), an activist group.

Paulo Roberto Costa, former head of Petrobras' refining and supply unit, has named dozens of politicians who allegedly took bribes from the Brazilian company. Costa claims that Petrobras paid out three percent of the value of new contracts to the politicians in return for favorable votes for the government.

Fracking for oil and gas across Europe has suffered a series of setbacks with Chevron closing its offices in Sofia, Bulgaria, and Shell postponing fracking plans in the Ukraine by at least two years. Meanwhile the French government is standing firm in its opposition to fracking.

Gazprom of Russia has begun fracking in western Siberia with the help of Anglo-Dutch giant Shell. The joint venture is introducing new technology developed in the U.S. to tap a vast reserve of oil known as the Bazhenov shale that lies under a 2.3 million square kilometer expanse.

A major U.S. government report on the Keystone XL pipeline was written by oil industry consultants, say activist groups. The report, which was commissioned by the State Department and published two weeks ago, downplays the environmental impact of the pipeline and has been seen as key to potential approval.

Bolivia has been ordered to pay $41 million to Rurelec, a UK energy company, in compensation for nationalizing the Guaracachi power plant in May 2010. The order represents a small profit for Rurelec which bought a 50.1 percent stake in 2006 but substantially less than what the company demanded.

Shell's plans to drill for oil in the Arctic's Chukchi Sea have been handed a major setback by a U.S appeals court which ruled that the Department of the Interior had underestimated the potential environment impact. The courts ordered the federal government to do a new assessment.

Two climate activists who staged a protest at the headquarters of Devon Energy, a Fortune 500 company based in Oklahoma city, have been charged with a "terrorism hoax" after black powder drifted down from a banner that they unfurled.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) is facing calls to be shut down for failing to properly manage the environmental catastrophe caused by the meltdown of three of the company's nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan. The disaster was the result of a tsunami triggered by a March 2011 earthquake.