BP, PORTRAIT OF A CORPORATE CRIMINAL

BP (formerly British Petroleum) has become one of the world’s most controversial giant corporations because of its involvement in a series of major environmental disasters and industrial accidents. The company has been the target of intense criticism for its role in the April 2010 explosion at a drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers and unleashed a vast underwater oil leak that has flowed largely unchecked for weeks. This incident occurred while BP was still contending with the legal and public relations fallout from a deadly explosion at a refinery in Texas, oil spills in the Alaskan tundra, and charges of manipulating energy commodities markets.

BP got its start exploring for oil in Persia (now Iran), where, in the 1950s, it enlisted the help of the American CIA to overthrow a populist leader who had nationalized the company’s assets in the country. Over the past quarter-century BP has solidified its position as one of the premier global oil companies with a series of acquisitions in the United States: Standard Oil of Ohio (1987), Amoco (1998) and Atlantic Richfield (2000).

Profile editor:

Phil Mattera

Accountability overview:

Despite professing adherence to the principles of corporate social responsibility, BP has repeatedly faced accusations that it behaved irresponsibly with regard to environmental compliance and attention to safety. In the United States, where a large portion of its operations are located, the company has been hit with some of the largest fines ever imposed by federal regulatory agencies. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will likely result in huge liabilities for the company, despite BP’s open efforts to shift blame to the rig’s owner Transocean and to Halliburton, which had been contracted to cap the ill-fated well. BP has also faced human rights charges in countries such as Indonesia, Turkey, and Colombia. In the Project On Government Oversight's Federal Contractor Misconduct Database, BP has the second most instances of misconduct (49, one less than Lockheed Martin) since 1995 and the 7th largest total of penalties and settlements ($1.5 billion).

CorpWatch announces release of the CrocTail application and open CorpWatch API June 8th, 2009

For Immediate Release June 8th, 2009 Contact: CorpWatch/Crocodyl.org: +1-415-641-1633 Lena Zuniga (lena@corpwatch.org); or Tonya Hennessey (tonya@corpwatch.org) CrocTail Release_Final.doc MAKING GOVERNMENT DATA USEABLE CrocTail application and open CorpWatch API provide easy access to Securities and Exchange Commission-derived corporate subsidiary data Press Release Link: http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15381 San Francisco, CA – CorpWatch.org, with support from the Sunlight Foundation, announces release of the CrocTail application and open CorpWatch API. CrocTail provides an interface for browsing information about several hundred thousand U.S. publicly traded corporations and their many foreign and domestic subsidiaries. Information from company Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings has been parsed and annotated by CorpWatch to highlight specific corporate accountability issues. CrocTail also serves as a demonstration of the features and data available through the CorpWatch API. CrocTail is an extension of the Crocodyl.org Wiki web site project, an online compendium profiling the accountability and transparency track records of multinational corporations. “The CrocTail application has particular relevance at this moment, with the public eye focused on the structural nature of corporate abuses, including multinational tax-avoidance and the use of off-shore subsidiaries to evade responsibility for human rights violations,” said Tonya Hennessey, project director at CorpWatch. “In the most egregious cases, corporations use subsidiaries to cloud their investments in dictatorships and violent regimes. Chevron in Burma and Marathon Oil in Equatorial Guinea are two examples.” One of the goals of the project is to make it transparently easy for users to research the structure of corporations and pinpoint where they operate. By visiting CrocTail, users can search the entire subsidiaries database; and see a window displaying known issues with subsidiaries, direct links to the root SEC filings, and links to the Crocodyl.org profile; a world map pinpointing subsidiary locations; and an expandable subsidiary tree for navigating the hierarchy. (Click on Halliburton Co for an example.) The site also has an edit mode, making it possible for registered researchers to add value by tagging subsidiaries with issues notes which will be automatically linked to the parent company profiles. What does the CorpWatch API do that the SEC doesn’t? Although the SEC provides a search interface for locating company filings (EDGAR / IDEA), the subsidiary information is not standardized. The CorpWatch developers wrote parsers to “scrape” the subsidiary relationship information from Exhibit 21 of the 10-K filings, and then built an "API" (Application Programming Interface) to provide a well-structured interface for web programs to query and process the subsidiary data. Coded by Skye Bender-deMoll and Greg Michalec, the CorpWatch API is available free to anyone who registers and abides by the Terms of Service. Using the API requires enough programming knowledge to be able to parse JSON or XML. For more information visit: http://api.corpwatch.org. About CorpWatch CorpWatch is a non-profit organization dedicated to investigative research and journalism to expose corporate malfeasance and to advocate for multinational corporate accountability and transparency. We seek to expose multinational corporations that that profit from war, fraud, environmental, human rights and other abuses, and to provide critical information to foster a more informed public and an effective democracy. Websites: http://www.CorpWatch.org, http://www.Crocodyl.org

CROCODYL

Collaborative Research on Corporations

Crocodyl is a collaboration between nonprofit organizations such as Center for Corporate Policy, CorpWatch, Corporate Research Project, other contributing organizations and individual contributors from around the world.

For small activist community groups campaigning against Bechtel in Nevada or Barrick Gold in Papua New Guinea, attempting to track and hold global multinationals accountable for environmental or human rights abuse in their communities is a formidable endeavor. Crocodyl can help them challenge the public relations machines of big business by providing an easy-to-access snapshot of information about these companies, including an inventory of their misdeeds. Crocodyl also increases traffic flow in the reverse direction, drawing attention to information gathered by small watchdog groups working on the front lines of corporate accountability. In addition, Crocodyl is intended to be useful to researchers, journalists, concerned investors, consumers and the public at large.

Using network tools such as the Wiki, Crocodyl.org enables disparate groups and individuals to pool our knowledge about specific corporations in order to reduce the high cost of corporate research and ensure maximum efficiency in holding corporations accountable. Now professional researchers in Mumbai, India can team up with a citizen journalist in the Netherlands to track international companies not easily held accountable in one country.

Our information is divided by Issue and Industry and tracks the impact of corporations on public policy, health, sustainability, human rights, social justice, labor, and issues relating to corporate responsibility. We use our contributors' knowledge and experience of these industries and issues to inform the global conversation in other online communities of knowledge, such as Wikipedia, SourceWatch, OpenCongress.org and WiserEarth.

The proliferation of Open Source and Free Software as well as the vibrant global conversations in the blogosphere bring to life the power of collaborative networking to create a more accessible information ecology. Our project allows technical and non-technical users alike to freely create and edit pages, with assurance that the highest standards will be upheld by the community of editors and experts. Anyone can add a page, making the new information available immediately and allowing ordinary citizens to report on a breaking news event, quicker than the mainstream media.. Information that is breaking, controversial, or in question is encouraged, but must be clearly sourced so that readers can judge the information for themselves.

Of course, no solution is perfect -- the very “open-source” nature of this kind of journalism means that companies themselves and malicious or misinformed individuals can publish material on the site, possibly distorting its accuracy. The solution is to use our community and our editors to vet and verify posted material, allowing the most thoroughly scrutinized material to be re-published in a section that is not open for general editing and is updated less frequently. In this way we can use the collective wisdom of industry watchdogs, nonprofits working on campaigns, company shareholders and other stakeholders to hold corporations to the highest standards of accountability.

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