Bribery, Fraud & Tax Evasion

Moti Group, a business conglomerate based in Johannesburg, tried to stop amaBhungane, a South African investigative news website, from reporting on leaked documents about an allegedly corrupt mining deal in Zimbabwe. A court-issued gag order was overturned on appeal in July 2023. Read More

Two of the biggest U.S. energy utilities - NextEra and Southern Company – have been using Matrix LLC, a secretive political consulting firm in Montgomery, Alabama, to fight regulators and progressive politicians in states like Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia, according to a slew of leaked internal memos. Read More

Fast food chain McDonald’s has more outlets in France than any other country in Europe. In 2013, there were 1,300 McDonald’s in France that generated €4.4 billion in revenue for the company. After McDonald’s was caught evading taxes between 2009 and 2020, the company agreed to pay the government of France €1.25 billion to avoid prosecution. Caught red handed Read More

Chuck Collins, author of "The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions," speaks by video with Pratap Chatterjee of CorpWatch about the Pandora Papers, and how a group of offshore consultancy firms design shell companies and trusts to help the very rich to avoid paying taxes. Read More

Millions of documents leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) reveal offshore assets of over 30 world leaders, 130 billionaires and 330 politicians, via 14 firms that offer services to set up secrecy and tax dodging entities. ICIJ has named this data collection the Pandora Papers. Read More

A cigarette factory with the capacity to produce three billion Dunhill cigarettes per year is expected to open up in Mali this year, the product of a partnership between British American Tobacco (BAT) and the Malian government, that the company claims will create as many as 200 permanent jobs. Read More

South African prosecutors seized luxury property and vehicles worth some 1.4 billion South African rand ($96.8 million) in early May from contractors and former officials at Eskom, South Africa's state-owned power utility, as they ramped up criminal proceedings over alleged corruption in construction orders for the Kusile Power Station. Read More

Three major global consulting firms - Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey Consultants & PricewaterhouseCoopers - have been implicated in helping Isabel dos Santos, daughter of the former president of Angola, become a billionaire allegedly by plundering state coffers. Read More

Wells Fargo bank, based in San Francisco, California, has agreed to pay the Navajo Nation $6.5 million for its alleged predatory business tactics. The bank was accused of targeting vulnerable members of the Navajo community, including elderly people who did not speak fluent English, with predatory banking practices. The Navajo Nation is the largest government recognized Native American indigenous community with over 350,000 members and a territory that encompasses lands in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. It has an elected government and its own judicial system. Read More

Uber, the global taxi technology company, has been using a clandestine tool named "Ripley" to thwart government oversight of the ride-sharing company by restricting access to company computers. The tool is named after Ellen Ripley, the heroine of Alien, the science fiction movie series. Read More