Gulliver
Exposing corporate wrongdoing
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Orpea
Orpea is a major operator of care homes and clinics across Europe. Founded by Dr. Jean-Claude Marian in 1989, it has been criticized for care home residents in France, union repression and embezzlement of public funds. Two years after Orpea bought up a home in Boissise-le-Roi in 2013, 28 families wrote to the Minister of Health to complain that the quality of care provided to residents had deteriorated because the company did not employ enough staff. Similar allegations were brought against Orpea at homes in Le Mans and Schiltigheim in 2016; in Niort and Échillais in 2017; and in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 2018. In Schiltigheim, Orpea was accused of changing the diapers of the elderly just once a day and changing bandages just once a week.
Ørsted
Electric utility Ørsted was originally a state-owned company called Dansk Naturgas A/S that was created by Denmark in 1972 to manage gas and oil resources in the Danish sector of the North Sea. Although it is still majority-owned by the Danish state, almost half of its shares are now held by investors following a contentious privatization process. In recent years, it has attempted to rebrand itself as "green" by selling off the Laggan-Tormore, Ormen Lange, and Syd Arne gas fields to Ineos for US$1.05 billion which continues to operate them.
Today it claims to be the largest offshore wind builder in the world, which it achieved by taking advantage of a system of guaranteed prices created in the 1990s and 2000s across Europe. The Renewable Energy Foundation, an anti-wind farm group, claims that the price guarantees resulted in Hornsey offshore wind array receiving a £479 million subsidy in 2020 alone, while the London Array received a £285 million subsidy. The company's onshore wind turbines have often been opposed by local communities such as in County Donegal, Ireland.
Penta Investments
Penta Investments, a private-equity group in central Europe, invests in banks, frozen foods, health care businesses, real estate and newspapers. Founded in 1994, the fund employed Alojz Lorenc, the last head of the Czechoslovak Secret Police in the Communist era. In December 2020, Jaroslav Haščák, a co-founder of Penta and the second-richest man in Slovakia, was arrested and charged with attempting to illegally obtain a set of classified wire-taps, code-named Gorilla, that were made by the Slovak Intelligence Service (SIS), that allegedly implicated him in a major corruption scandal.
Pfizer
Pfizer, the largest pharmaceutical company in the world, was founded in 1849. It has been prosecuted for illegal marketing and misleading advertising for a number of drugs like arthritis drug Bextra (valdecoxib), Centrum multivitamins, bladder drug Detrol (tolterodine), anti-epilepsy drug Neurotonin (gabapentin), statin medication Lipitor (atorvastatin) and kidney transplant drug Rapamune (sirolimus). It paid the U.S. government $2.3 billion in 2009 after pleading guilty to the illegal marketing of Bextra. The company was also sued in Nigeria for conducting drug trials with trovafloxacin, an experimental antibiotic, during a meningitis epidemic in Nigeria in 1996 without getting permission from their parents, dozens of whom died subsequently.