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Outrage at UN decision to exonerate Shell for oil pollution in Niger delta
[Quote]:
A three-year investigation by the United Nations will almost entirely exonerate Royal Dutch Shell for 40 years of oil pollution in the Niger delta, causing outrage among communities who have long campaigned to force the multinational to clean up its spills and pay compensation.
Before you click through – take a guess who funded the investigation.
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Looks suspicious, but if Shell were mostly innocent and offered to fund an investigation to prove it, they couldn’t succeed in your book.
Here’s the bike of Mike Cowing, the guy who led the UNEP investigation:
http://www.unep.org/documents.multilingual/default.asp?documentid=585&articleid=6151&l=en
Doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who’s in it for a buck, eh?
(I’m not claiming this proves anything, of course, but in my mind his bio goes a fair way to balance the fact that the study was paid for by Shell. Unless there’s some really deep corruption going on (not impossible in the UN, but not the trend, I’d guess), Cowing wouldn’t be bothering to lead a sham investigation.)
Looks suspicious, but if Shell were mostly innocent and offered to fund an investigation to prove it, they couldn’t succeed in your book.
Correct. For things like this, they should have avoided everything that makes it even look improper. And come on, Shell isn’t stupid, they should know that a favorable outcome of sponsored research would be questioned – why are they still doing this?
“And come on, Shell isn’t stupid, they should know that a favorable outcome of sponsored research would be questioned – why are they still doing this?”
Paid for by Shell, not sponsored by Shell – I pay for the blood test if I cause an accident, but I don’t sponsor it.
Why do this? I don’t know. One possible reason is because they were told: And you gonna pay the expenses of this investigation, we won’t waste “public” money on it.
I don’t say that’s what happened, but “paid for by” can be involuntary too.