You might want to click on it to enlarge it, but this infogram demonstrates the largest corporate fines and settlements for the last seven years. I am most interested in the disparity among the oil companies. Exxon-Valdez paid $507 million in fines for its 1989 spill in Alaska (which has not been totally cleaned up yet). This is just 11% of its annual earnings. In contrast, the BP Gulf of Mexico spill cost that corporation 110% of its annual earnings, and rightly so. I would attribute this to heightened environmental sensitives regarding environmental damage in the U.S. However, unless I am not interpreting it correctly, the display also says that Shell paid 6% of annual earnings to settle a Niger Delta case in 2000. Perhaps we have different sources of data, but Shell’s earnings in 2006 were $25.36-25.44 billion and not just over 26 billion, but I suppose when analyzing such an absurd profit that doesn’t make much difference. My main point is that the well-known Wiwa settlement occurred in 2009, not 2000, and it was for $15.5 million, not $1.5 billion. This large discrepancy means the settlement was actually a mere .004% of annual earnings, not 6%. To put that in perspective, the Shell corporation earns about $2.5 million per hour, so they worked off the irreversible destruction of millions’ of farmers and fishermen’s land in just over 6 hours.
African Society and Conflict 