Gulliver

Vattenfall is a Swedish state-owned energy company that derives most of its energy from hydroelectric dams and nuclear power. It has attempted to portray itself as green by selling off power plants and lignite coal mines in Germany to Energetický a Průmyslový Holding (EPH). The plants are still running at almost full capacity and will not shut down until 2038.

The company sued the government of Germany twice when it stood to lose profits in the face of environmental regulation. The first case was brought in 2009, in which Vattenfall demanded €1.4 billion in compensation over the imposition of strict environmental requirements to protect the Elbe River from the Moorburg coal-fired power station. In the second case, Vattenfall sued for €3.7 billion in 2012 in compensation for the decision to shut down the company’s nuclear power plants.

Vattenfall has been criticized for its role in the design of the Theun Hinboun hydropower dam in Laos, which displaced thousands in the 1990s. In Colombia, it sources coal from the Cerrejón coal mine and associated port and railroad were constructed by the forcible removal of the Indigenous Wayüu community of Tamaquito as well as the Afro-Colombian inhabitants of Tabaco beginning in the 1980s with little or no compensation.
 

Verizon is the second-largest U.S. telecommunications provider. It is an heir to the American Bell Telephone Company network founded in 1877 that was broken up into seven regional companies a century later. One of those seven was Bell Atlantic, which later re-acquired other parts of the original network, and eventually became Verizon in the year 2000. Verizon was outed by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 for collaborating with the spy agency to secretly collect communications data of millions of U.S. customers. The company has lobbied heavily against ‘net neutrality’ which requires companies to provide Internet content at the same speed rather than favoring one content provider (such as major video and web distributors) over the others. 
 

Car manufacturer Volkswagen (which means “the people’s car” in German) was founded in 1934 as a prestige project of Adolf Hitler to develop a cheap vehicle that could be used by the general population. The first car that it manufactured was the Beetle that was built by migrant workers from Hungary, Poland and the Soviet Union as well as forced labor from concentration camps during World War II. Over the years, Volkswagen did business with the apartheid regime in South Africa as well as the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1964-1965, where it turned over trade unionists and suspected communist sympathizers to the police who then tortured them. The company has since agreed to compensate workers enslaved in Nazi Germany as well as victims of police torture in Brazil.

In recent years, Volkswagen has been forced to pay US$25 billion in fines, penalties, civil damages and restitution in the U.S. for the Dieselgate emissions scandal, after it secretly installed a “defeat” device into 11 million cars sold worldwide between 2008 and 2015 to make it appear that the vehicles did not exceed legal limits for pollution. This was despite the fact that some of the company’s cars were emitting up to 40 times greater than the maximum allowed for nitrogen oxide.