Construction & Megaprojects

Roberto David Castillo, former CEO of Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima (DESA) in the Honduras, has been convicted of the murder of Berta Cáceres, an activist who was fighting the Agua Zarca dam on the territory of the indigenous Lenca people, five years after she was killed in March 2016. Read More

Denka, the owners of the factory believed to be the major cause of cancer in a Louisiana neighborhood with the highest cancer rates in the United States, has been challenged over its failed efforts to weaken environmental standards and its claim that the factory has reduced toxic airborne emissions. 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

One megaship - the Ever Given operated by Evergreen Marine of Taiwan - single-handedly blocked as much as 12 percent of global shipping last week when it got stuck in the Suez canal en route from the port of Ningbo in China to the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Read More

Cricket – easily India’s favorite sport with over 760 million viewers tuning into televised matches every year – is always a major event across the subcontinent. So after the coronavirus pandemic shut down major sporting events, the Indian national team’s first international match in Sydney, Australia, was a momentous occasion. Read More

The companies that designed, manufactured, and installed cladding - a material used to wrap a building under construction - that caught fire at Grenfell Tower in London in June 2017, killing 72 people, have asked a UK public inquiry to award them immunity from prosecution, before they provide evidence. 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

A Brazilian judge has ordered Vale to compensate families of some 300 people killed at the company’s Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine when a dam built to hold waste collapsed on January 25, 2019, near the town of Brumadinho in the state of Minas Gerais. Read More

Representatives of some 280 indigenous nations have joined a protest on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota to oppose the construction of an oil pipeline by Energy Transfer Partners. If completed, the Dakota Access Pipeline is expected to help move 570,000 barrels of crude daily to Illinois. Read More

Media attending the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro are being housed in apartments constructed by workers "in conditions analogous to slavery" by Cyrela, the largest real estate company in Brazil. The local community has also complained that the construction has ruined the water supply and destroyed forested areas. Read More