The British seem to regard homicide when committed by a corporation as rather different from ordinary murder.   It’s true that companies don’t want or intend to kill people (unless of course they’re arms manufacturers), but how should we regard (a) bribing officials of a non-Western country to import a fuel additive known to cause brain damage to children? (b) secretly dumping in a Third World country waste oil residues with a toxicity to kill? and (c) paying out a $15m out of court settlement in a Third World country to avoid further action against its collaboration with that government in the execution of protestors challenging its oil depredations?   All 3 cases involved British companies. The second example was Trafigura, a large British oil trader, which bribed a local contractor in the Ivory Coast to dump hundreds of tonnes of highly toxic contaminated oil and noxious sulphur compounds in a vast lake of  foul-smelling black waste which killed 15 people and poisoned 30,000 others.   The third was Shell which, after pollution and damage from its oil operations in the Niger Delta estimated to have cost $20bn, used its close relationship with the government to secure the arrest and execution 0f the writer Sar0-Wiwa and 8 other leaders of the Ogoni tribe in southern Nigeria.

The latest example that has now just come to light concerns Octel, the Merseyside chemical company, which paid £multi-million bribes to officials in Iraq and Indonesia to carry on importing tetra ethyl lead (TEL), a highly toxic fuel additive which is so potent it drove the workers of its original US manufacturers mad.   A US formal sentencing document states “Innospec (to which the firm changed its name from Octel when the truth started to come out) admits its former chief executive officer (Dennis Kerrison) ….approved payment of its kickbacks”.

The corruption was on a huge scale, aggressively persistent, and deliberately designed to maximise profits.   In 2007 the company paid bribes to Iraq to sabotage field trials of MMT, a non-lead alternative additive.   In Indonesia bribes were poured into a ‘defence of lead’ campaign to pay off local politicians, which successfully delayed the phase-out of TEL for 5 years.   An Octel executive later wrote “Indonesia was planning to go lead-free in 2000… but since January 2000 until the present we have supplied 28,390 tons of TEL….generating $277 million in revenue”.

This is not muder in the ordinary sense.   But deliberately to export to third world countries, with weaker regulatory systems and more open to bribery, products which are known to choke, poison, cause brain damage and can lead to death is certainly culpable homicide.   Any such practices should be rigorously investigated and, where proven, should generate the stronest deterrent penalties.   The leading executives responsible should lose their jobs, suffer a lengthy term and be prohibited from holding any senior business post thereafter.   The firm should be subjecto to a very substantial fine and in the worst cases closed down.   What price protecting life in a greedy capitalist society?

Bookmark to: