Global Trade

The Yerisiam Gua indigenous community of West Papua filed a complaint six months ago against a Sri Lankan owned conglomerate for taking over their land to create a palm oil plantation. To this day, the industry body charged with oversight has yet to formally respond to their concerns. Read More

Six executives of Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis have been indicted in a South Korean bribery scandal. The indictments follow similar charges in China, Turkey and the U.S. and allegations of falsifying drug trial data in Japan. Korean prosecutors have recommended that Novartis sales be suspended for six months. Read More

A number of safari companies in Africa used Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm, to evade taxes on income from foreign clients, according to data from the 'Panama Papers' a leaked cache of 11.5 million documents revealed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). Read More

Greek tax investigators have raided the house of Christos Sclavounis, the former head of investment banking for UBS. The crackdown is part of an agreement that the country reached with international lenders in order to reduce tax evasion by Greek elites suspected of hiding their income in Switzerland. Read More

Cairn Energy, a Scottish oil exploration company, has demanded that India pay $5.6 billion in compensation for losses that the company claims it has sustained as a result of a tax bill. The company has taken its claim to an arbitration panel under the United Kingdom-India Investment Treaty. Read More

Villagers in Tororo district, Uganda, not far from the Kenyan border, say that Guangzhou Dongsong Energy, a company from China, has conspired with the government to cheat them out of their land titles in order to build a $600 million phosphate mine and industrial complex. Read More

Vietnam has asked Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Corporation to pay $500 million in compensation for dumping toxic waste in Ky Anh that resulted in a massive fish kill on a 120 mile stretch of Vietnam's central coast in the provinces of Ha Tinh, Hue, Quang Binh and Quang Tri. Read More

Activists have condemned Credit Suisse and VTB of Russia for lending $850 million to Mozambique in 2013 that was used mostly to buy military equipment, despite telling the public that the money would be used to buy fishing boats. Read More

The South African government has intervened to support the Indian-born Gupta brothers, owners of a sprawling conglomerate with interests from mining to media, following a scandal that suggested that the brothers had accumulated so much power that they could dictate cabinet-level decisions in the country. Read More

Did a few individual traders in London conspire to rig global interest rates in order to enrich themselves or were they just pawns in an ongoing conspiracy by major banks designed to routinely skim billions from the international financial system? Read More