Privatization & Procurement

Energy poverty – the lack of access to basic electricity and fuel – became a fashionable topic after the term was coined in the 1990s. So, when Universidad Pontificia Comillas, a university in Madrid, Spain, launched a Department of Energy and Poverty in 2018, it was seen as a bold initiative.  Read More

When Hurricane Fiona, a Category One storm, hit Puerto Rico last September, all three million people on the island were plunged into darkness. Members of the U.S. Congress questioned why LUMA Energy, the company that was awarded the power system management contract in 2020, was unable to cope. Read More

Morgan Simon, a social justice activist, wrote several articles about how CoreCivic, which operates prisons and immigration detention centres, was profiting off the policy of the Trump administration of separating migrant children from their parents. CoreCivic sued Simon for $60 million but a U.S. judge in California ruled in Simon’s favor. Read More

COVID-19 mortality rates at eldercare homes in Madrid managed by private companies DomusVi and Orpea were close to double that of eldercare homes in public hands during the first wave of the pandemic, as illustrated in a new map published by CorpWatch. Read More

CorpWatch is publishing a guide to over a dozen of the worst companies profiting from healthcare privatization in Europe. Workers are being paid less, clinics are being shut, and worse yet: people's health is suffering and death rates are increasing to line the pockets of investors and top managers. Read More

La tasa de mortalidad por covid-19 en las residencias de mayores de Madrid gestionadas por las empresas privadas DomusVi y Orpea durante la primera ola de la pandemia fue casi el doble de la tasa en las residencias de mayores de titularidad pública, ilustrado en un nuevo mapa publicado por CorpWatch. Read More

Aqua America, a subsidiary of Essential Utilities of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, made an unsolicited $1.1 billion bid in 2020 to buy the sewage system of Bucks County in Pennsylvania. The deal would have been the largest sewage privatization deal in U.S. history. Residents of the county stopped the deal from happening, with the help of grassroots organizations and local county officials. Read More

In December 2021, residents of the Westside mobile home park in Durango, Colorado, received a notice that their park was up for sale. Although the park residents owned their own homes, they did not own the land on which their homes stood.  Knowing that when mobile home parks are sold, residents often face either eviction or significant rent increases, the residents decided to raise the money to purchase the park themselves. Read More

Hermine Bideaux died of COVID-19 in April 2020 after being rushed to a hospital near the Korian Bel Air eldercare home near Paris, France. Olivia Mokiejewski, her granddaughter, has since filed a manslaughter and endangerment lawsuit against Korian for Hermine’s death, one of many lodged against the company. Read More

French investigators raided the headquarters of the Orpea Group in Puteux, just outside Paris, as well as multiple eldercare homes operated by the company, in response to a new book titled "Les Fossoyeurs" (“The Gravediggers”) that alleged that residents were being mistreated. Read More