Newsletter No 23

Date: 29 May 2026

 

Towards an agenda for transforming corporate power

This month, Critical Takes took a look at an ambitious new report from a UN special rapporteur on “eradicating poverty beyond growth.”

You can read my analysis of the report here. One can see in the report some of the elements of a joined-up agenda for curbing corporate power, namely:

· Reforming corporate income taxation and ambitious use of other taxes as a tool to contain private capital, for instance windfall taxes and “climate damage taxes”.

· Using competition law to break up concentrations of corporate power.

· Opening up corporate control over intellectual property, which the report suggests doing on human rights grounds (for example, for medicines).

· Deterring corporate capture of politics by more strictly regulating the interactions between corporate interests and decision-makers.

· Democratising big business and its supply chains by, among other things, strengthening workplace democracy (within big firms and along their supply chains) and actively promoting more democratic firms of enterprise.

Ultimately the last point is necessary to safeguard the others. As long as trade and investment are dominated by giant corporations owned and controlled by a wealthy minority and dedicated above all to maximising their profits, then other goals will be difficult to win and to preserve thereafter.

So it’s necessary not just to persuade governments to impose constraints on these corporations from the outside, but also to shrink their role in society and change its nature.

 

Tracking corporate abuses

Also on Critical Takes this month, Philip Mattera of Good Jobs First explained the Violation Trackers: three very user-friendly databases containing records of regulatory violations by thousands of companes in the US, UK and other parts of the world.

These Violation Trackers are an excellent resource for anyone working on problems of corporate power and I wish they’d existed many years ago when I was doing name-and-shame reports on big companies. I’d recommend taking a look if you haven’t already.

 

Shell and the history of investment arbitration

I came across this interesting article which discusses the role of Shell in influencing legal norms about investment protection in the 1950s and 1960s, as European empires were coming to an end.

The article grabbed my attention because it mentions Indonesia, where I used to live and work, and it features Shell which is the epitome of the ugly multinational.

Shell had gained immensely valuable oil concessions during the colonial era and wanted to protect them from newly-independent states trying to assert sovereign control over their own natural resources.  

Not wanting to openly anger the Indonesian government, which had a revolutionary nationalist complexion in the 1950s, Shell covertly backed a court case by another Dutch company whose purpose was to create legal precedents against nationalisation.

At the same time, Shell lobbied to influence a nascent OECD treaty,  various bilateral investment treaties and even UN resolutions. This lobbying contributed to the result that foreign investment contracts, which had been seen as a matter of national law, were seen from then on as being in need of special treatment in international law.

The article is informative about the interplay of Shell’s actions with those of other oil companies, supportive Western governments and sovereign self-assertion in the global South. It makes clear the close historical relationship between international investment arbitration and the interests of the fossil fuel industry, which endures until today.

Ironically, Shell is currently suing the Netherlands, which backed its lobbying all those decades ago to create corporate escape routes from national sovereignty. This is one of those cases where what goes around eventually comes around.

Dismantling "investor-state dispute settlement" (ISDS), to stop investors from suing states which want to phase out fossil fuels, is now one of the demands of civil society organisations for the energy transition as this handy blog from the Resource Justice Network explains.

In June I’ll be working on an updated version of “So, What Should We Do About Corporate Power?” I’m also planning a couple of audio interviews with interesting people.

Until next month, good luck with your work!

Diarmid