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Secretive company Glencore now has to come clean, well, a bit, anyway

Secretive Glencore, Swiss- based international company, has a very bad record – connected with fraud, corruption, environmental degradation (- check it out at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glencore )

Glencore is now more or less forced to reveal some information, seeing that it recently changed from  a private company to public.  The change was connected to it increasing its share in uranium miner Xstrata . Pretty inportant, as Xstrata is defending an environmental court case run by Friends of the Earth – a FOE win here could be an unwelcome precedent for Glencore’s world-wide activities. –  Christina Macpherson

Glencore’s 1st Sustainability Report Shows 18 Deaths, Planet Ark, s 08-Sep-11 Eric Onstad Commodities group Glencore released its first sustainability report on Wednesday showing it paid $780,000 in major environmental fines last year and had 18 fatalities.

Glencore, one of the world’s largest commodities trader, promised to launch sustainability reporting during the run-up to its listing earlier this year after spending decades as a private company, revealing minimal information about its business to the general public.

The 106-page report said the company incurred four major environmental fines each worth more than $10,000, relating to encroachment on protected land at unidentified locations and for emissions, water discharge and tailings disposal in Kazakhstan.  In contrast, the world’s biggest mining group BHP Billiton reported environmental fines of $35,057 for its 2010 financial year ending in June and miner Rio Tinto paid $540,328 in fines last year……
Glencore also said it had joined the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which seeks to boost accountability and governance by getting companies to publish what they pay governments and the nations to disclose how much they receive from mining and oil production….

Glencore’s total revenues were $145 billion, the bulk from trading activities, and total core profit was $6.2 billion, but the group has historically paid very low taxes on its trading operation, according to analysts.

Liberum Capital has said Glencore, based in the low-tax canton of Zug in Switzerland, has paid a corporate tax rate close to zero on its trading business up until last year due to its partner ownership structure…. http://planetark.org/enviro-news/item/63196

September 9, 2011 - Posted by | 2 WORLD, secrets,lies and civil liberties

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