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Decolonising Energy: An excerpt from ‘Energy beyond Neoliberalism’
Back in Spring, the Kilburn Manifesto team asked whether we’d like to submit a chapter on energy to their project. Edited by Soundings founding editors Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, and Mike Rustin, After Neoliberalism seeks to open up space to debate alternatives to current dominant neoliberal systems. Most of our campaigning on oil focuses on…
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Egypt lost $10 billion in corrupt gas contracts, as daily blackouts spread
Egypt lost $10 billion in gas revenues from 2005-2011, according to a report launched yesterday by EIPR and Platform. Contracts signed during the Mubarak years allowed the export of billions of cubic metres of underpriced gas to Jordan, Spain and Israeli-occupied Palestine. Some of the individuals behind these deals were convicted of corruption. EIPR and…
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Rewriting the future: Achebe, literature, and activism
Nigerian write Chinua Achebe died last Thursday at the age of 83. He is a key figure in world literature and a writer who along with others utterly changed the way cultures pre- and post-imperialism – and pre-missionary – imagined representing themselves. In so doing, he bolstered the challenge to western and white supremacist…
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Want to understand the routes of corporate power? Read ‘The corporation that changed the world’
Whether it’s Google, Amazon, Starbucks using legal loopholes to avoid corporation tax; Apple’s subcontractors’ deathly abuse of workers in China; the ongoing call for justice from Bhopal over Union Carbide; Shell, BP’s activities in numerous vulnerable oil-affected communities; the bailout of RBS and Lloyds/TSB as ‘too big to fail’; or G4S taking over running sections of…
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“An unexpectedly engaging tale” – The Oil Road reviewed in the FT
This weekend the Financial Times featured a great essay by Ed Crooks on some accounts of the oil industry. We were thrilled that Crooks led with Fuel on the Fire and Platform’s new book The Oil Road, as well as Jeff Rubin’s The Big Flatline. Fuel on the Fire, published in 2011, reveals the oil…
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29 Aug 2012 adminStrong Laws Needed To Curb Corporate Abuse
This is a guest post by Katie Redford, Director of EarthRights International. For many in the international human rights community, the new data about Shell’s security spending in Nigeria – including outlays of over $380,000,000 for just the period from 2007 to 2009 – released last week by Platform, is not surprising. The multinational oil giant has had…
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Oil companies gave cash and contracts to militants and warlords in Nigeria
Shell and Chevron have funded armed militant groups in the volatile Niger Delta region of Nigeria since at least 2003, according to oil-industry sources and US embassy cables. Both oil companies have also paid ‘protection’ money to other hostile groups for decades. Platform’s new briefing, as reported in the Daily Mail, is called Fuelling the Violence: Oil…
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AUDIO-FEST! Shell security spending hits the global airwaves
Here’s a selection of interviews with Platform on Shell’s security spending in Nigeria. Packing these – and these – into a single day was a logistical challenge to say the least. But doing so meant reaching an audience of millions across several continents. Hitting the radio waves was particularly important for us, since the source…
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Dutch MPs investigate Shell’s “irresponsible and unacceptable” security spending
Following Platform’s publication of leaked internal data on Shell’s security spending in Nigeria and beyond, several Dutch MPs have submitted official questions to the Netherlands government, probing Shell’s record on human rights abuses. If only UK MPs would emulate their Dutch colleagues, we may actually see a measure of corporate accountability. Below is a rough…
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Hold Shell to account for its human rights abuses in Nigeria
Dear friends, Over the past 48 hours, Shell’s active role in human rights abuses in Nigeria has been exposed in a new Platform briefing: Dirty Work: Shell’s Security Spending in Nigeria. The briefing analyses financial data from Shell’s security department, leaked to Platform by a concerned ex-Shell manager. The leaked data covers three bloody years of…
