Glencore finances global campaigns against Indigenous communities and activists to support its coal profits.
The largest trader of commodities and the largest mining company in the world by revenue, Glencore controls or produces huge portions of the global supply of coal, zinc, cobalt, and other minerals, metals, fuels and foods. The company’s undermining of democracy is not in dispute, as it has in recent years pled guilty to committing bribery, corruption, and market manipulation in countries as varied as Venezuela, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and South Sudan.
The scale of Glencore’s global lobbying lays bare the organisational conviction that it, rather than the voting public, should determine policy. While it publicly shows itself to support measures such as the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, for years it has made use of right-wing consultants to spend “millions bankrolling a secret, globally coordinated campaign to prop up coal demand by undermining environmental activists, influencing politicians and spreading sophisticated pro-coal messaging on social media.” This self-serving posture is also exhibited in its efforts to undermine popular climate policy in the European Union, the United States, and South Africa.
Where does it get the money to exert so much influence? In part by evading corporate taxes. Publish What You Pay found that Glencore “is the most opaque mining company in our survey with 46% of its 46 subsidiaries incorporated in Secrecy Jurisdictions,” also known as tax havens. The extent of its secret holdings was revealed in the 2017 Paradise Papers leak.
Glencore is even alleged to have contributed to financing right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia as well as “special energy and road battalions” that were used to repress protests and strikes in Peru. Union leaders in Peru have condemned Glencore for “the company’s disrespect of local court decisions and the lack of dialogue with the union.” In South Africa, union leaders have “denounced 12-hour work shifts without financial compensation and the company’s attempt to ensure there are no unions.”
This long track record of subverting democratic processes has made Glencore the target of campaigns by coal mine communities, Indigenous peoples, environmentalists, trade unions, and even its own investors.
