Inside The Global “Club” That Helps Executives Escape Their Crimes
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...urt#.mkveR5jXw
A parallel legal universe, open only to corporations and largely invisible to
everyone else, helps executives convicted of crimes escape punishment. Part one
of a BuzzFeed News investigation.
Imagine a private, global super court that empowers corporations to bend
countries to their will.
Say a nation tries to prosecute a corrupt CEO or ban dangerous pollution.
Imagine that a company could turn to this super court and sue the whole country
for daring to interfere with its profits, demanding hundreds of millions or even
billions of dollars as retribution
Known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, it is written into a vast
network of treaties that govern international trade and investment, including
NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Congress must soon decide whether
to ratify.
Imagine that this court is so powerful that nations often must heed its rulings
as if they came from their own supreme courts, with no meaningful way to appeal.
That it operates unconstrained by precedent or any significant public oversight,
often keeping its proceedings and sometimes even its decisions secret.
Because the system is so secretive, it is not possible to know the total number
of ISDS cases, but lawyers in the field say it is skyrocketing. Indeed, of the
almost 700 publicly known cases across the last half century, more than a tenth were filed just last year.
The series starts today with perhaps the least known and most jarring
revelation: Companies and executives accused or even convicted of crimes have escaped punishment by turning to this special forum. Based on exclusive reporting from the Middle East, Central America, and Asia, BuzzFeed News has found the following:
A Dubai real estate mogul and former business partner of Donald Trump was sentenced to prison for collaborating on a deal that would swindle the Egyptian people out of millions of dollars — but then he turned to ISDS and got his prison sentence wiped away.
In El Salvador, a court found that a factory had poisoned a village —
including dozens of children — with lead, failing for years to take
government-ordered steps to prevent the toxic metal from seeping out. But the factory owners’ lawyers used ISDS to help the company dodge a criminal conviction and the responsibility for cleaning up the area and providing needed medical care.
Two financiers convicted of embezzling more than $300 million from an
Indonesian bank used an ISDS finding to fend off Interpol, shield their assets, and effectively nullify their punishment.
This is how they do it, the layers of corruption never ends. There are four parts to this article.
All parts here:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...urt#.mkveR5jXw