Newsletter No 12
Date: 30 May 2025
I’ve just interviewed Jayati Ghosh, the eminent economist, who talked about multinationals increasingly making profits by playing off countries’ regulations against each other and exploiting special zones which offer them low taxes and weak regulation.
Keep an eye out for the interview early in June. Also next month: Cecilia Rikap looks at what’s really going on inside the Cloud.
This month, Livi Gerbase and Jason Ward of CICTAR looked at investments by Canadian public pension funds which extract profits from public services and infastructure.
They find that Canadian public workers’ savings are increasingly being invested in ways that can make life harder for workers elsewhere.
One of the examples is the now-infamous French private care provider Orpea, which had to be bailed out after a huge scandal over its poor treatment of its employees and patients.
Another name which comes up is Brookfield Asset Management, a giant investment firm which was chaired until recently by Mark Carney, who is now Canada’s prime minister, and which does much of its business through the tax haven of Bermuda.
Also this month, Tessa Khan of Uplift talked to Critical Takes about the legal and political fight for a just energy transition in the UK’s North Sea.
The UK’s government has pledged not to grant licences to new oil and gas fields and, since oil production in the North Sea is declining anyway, that shouldn’t be a hard pledge to keep.
Nonetheless, the fossil fuel industry and its sympathisers in the UK (including within the ruling Labour party) are trying to get that pledge rolled back.
The fight is likely to centre on Rosebank, a large untapped oil field off the coast of Scotland. Uplift and Greenpeace UK won a key court case earlier this year but Norway’s state oil company Equinor, which wants to exploit the Rosebank field, hasn’t given up.
Matti Ylönen looked back at ground-breaking work on corporate malpractice by academics and researchers in the 1970s and 1980s, much of it under the auspices of the now-defunct United Nations Commission on Transnational Corporations.
That thinking was submerged by the neoliberal wave in the 1990s and Matti argues that official responses to tax abuses and other financial scandals in this century were hampered by this loss of intellectual memory.
Before its demise, the UNCTC was working on a Code of Conduct for multinational corporations whose last draft was written in 1988. I’m planning to take a closer look at that draft soon, to see what we can learn from it today.
Interesting takes in other places
Jayati Ghosh talked in her interview with Critical Takes about the importance to multinational profits of control over knowledge.
Here’s an account from Aidan Regan of Democracy Challenged of how US corporations turn the right to use knowledge (not even the knowledge itself) into an intangible asset and park it in Ireland in order to avoid other countries’ taxes. The effect of tax-driven financial flows is notoriously so large that it's distorted Ireland's GDP figures.
He says: “What the model offers is not sustainable growth or prosperity, but a temporary share of global rent flows, dependent on favourable politics and creative accounting.”
And here’s a telling story about a wrangle between Glencore and a Chinese mining firm, CMOC, over a ban on cobalt exports from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Such wrangles may become more common as world demand grows for critical minerals. A plot twist is that the head of trading at the Chinese firm apparently used to work for Glencore.
A request for your help
By design, Critical Takes grows through the social networks of its users. Please tell people about the platform and encourage them to sign up to this newsletter or follow Critical Takes on social media.
It’s especially important at the moment because I need to raise third-party funding soon to keep the platform going. The bigger its reach, the better my chances of convincing a funder.
Thank you! And till next month, good luck with your work.
Diarmid