Reply #39: Chevron happy in Venezuela, says it's there for the 'long term'

[Judi Lynn]

Chevron happy in Venezuela, says it's there for the 'long term'

By Isabel Ordonez
Last update: 6:49 a.m. EST Feb. 29, 2008Print E-mail RSS Disable Live Quotes

HOUSTON (MarketWatch) -- Chevron Corp. (CVX:CVX CVX, , ) sees its oil business with Venezuela as a "long-term" relationship, a top executive of the oil giant said Thursday, adding that Chevron plans to comply with new contractual terms for its projects in the Orinoco Belt.

"We will continue to follow our contract to the government of Venezuela and PdVSA," Ali Moshiri, president for Chevron Africa and Latin America Exploration and Production, told Dow Jones Newswires. "We are in Venezuela for the long term."

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/chevron-happy-venezuela-says-its/story.aspx?guid=%7B8660EC7A-0996-4225-ABD3-C8F305A4164C%7D

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Nestle:

Murder in Colombia Prompts Group to Sue Nestle Units in Miami
Miami Herald

October 28, 2006

» View nestlesuit_miamiherald_102806.pdf

The widow of a brutally murdered Nestlé worker joins others in a lawsuit against the firm over her
husband's death.
BY JANE BUSSEY
[e-mail]

Colombian trade unionist Luciano Enrique Romero died a slow death. The fired Nestlé factory worker, whose body was found in a paramilitary-controlled area of Colombia a year ago, was tied up, tortured and then stabbed 40 times.

Now Romero's widow, Colombian labor union SINALTRAINAL and the Washington-based International Labor Rights Fund have filed a lawsuit in Miami charging Nestlé USA and Nestlé of Colombia with complicity in his death.

Nestlé USA, headquartered in Glendale, Calif., said in response to questions Friday: ''We have not been served with a copy of the lawsuit, and therefore we have no comment at this time.'' The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Switzerland-based Nestlé SA, the largest food and beverage company in the world.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court, charges that Romero was killed by members of Colombia's paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces because the union leader helped expose Nestlé's use of expired milk in its Milo brand drink. The Colombian government later confirmed the 2001 allegations, the lawsuit said.

Nestlé operated in complicity with the paramilitary; plant managers met openly with them inside the factory in Valledupar, in northern Colombia, the lawsuit said.

In October 2002, Nestlé fired Romero, a 20-year veteran. Romero also received numerous death threats, and two years ago he fled to Spain, where the Organization of American States International Committee on Human Rights placed him under a protection program.

More:
http://www.laborrights.org/end-violence-against-trade-unions/colombia/969

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Nestlé SA

• Corporate Crimes
  
• Unethical Marketing of Artificial Baby Milk
  
• Exploiting Farmers
  
• Union Busting
  
• Promotion of GM Food
  
• The Ethiopia scandal
  
• Illegal extraction of groundwater
  
• Pollution
  
• Pyres of Burning Animals
  
• Fraudulent Labeling
  
• Perpetuating Sexism
  
• Promoting unhealthy food
  
• Promoting untested nano-technology
  
• Backlashing against Fairtrade

http://www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=240

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Parmalat? Don't make people laugh:

Inside the Parmalat Scandal: What You Need to Know?
Our Paesani
by Francesca Di Meglio

DECEMBER 28, 2003 - For Christmas this year, Italians certainly got a surprise: The country's eighth-largest industrial group, Parmalat, filed for bankruptcy in light of an Enron-like accounting scandal.

Parmalat, a food group famous all over the world for its long-lasting milk products, employs 35,000 people in 30 different countries. The news of cooked books or creative accounting has erupted into a full-fledge investigation into the company's practices - and will have long-lasting ramifications on Italian business and politics.

The story began a little more than a week ago when Parmalat announced that Bank of America had declared false a document, which showed a deposit of nearly 4 billion euros in Parmalat's Bonlat Financing Corp. in the Cayman Islands. The disclosure sent shockwaves throughout Italy, worrying investors and knocking market confidence. Prosecutors began to investigate other questionable financial transactions, as the government rushed to develop a bankruptcy protection plan for the firm. Already, media reports are suggesting that the hole in Parmalat's accounts could prove to be as big as 10 billion euros or $12 billion, according to Reuters. A scanning machine may even have been used to falsify Bank of America documents

Calisto Tanzi, who had run the company since founding it in 1961, is at the center of the probe into fraud. Although investigators have searched Tanzi's home, they were unable to take him in for questioning last week reportedly because he fled to another country. Tanzi sent word that he had taken a holiday but would be available later, according to various media outlets.

More:
http://www.italiansrus.com/articles/ourpaesani/parmalat.htm

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The Latin America Factor in the Scandal at Parmalat

By TONY SMITH
Published: January 13, 2004
Was South America the problem with Parmalat?

The company's founder, Calisto Tanzi, who is in police custody in Italy, has hinted to investigators that the accounting fraud uncovered at Parmalat was driven partly by a need to hide huge losses at the company's South American operations. A lawsuit by an American pension fund accuses Citigroup of helping Parmalat cover a gap in its balance sheet created by a Brazilian subsidiary. And an important figure in the widening investigation, Giovanni Bonici, returned to Italy and surrendered to the authorities last week after briefly hiding in Venezuela, where he once ran Parmalat's local unit.

But many analysts doubt that Parmalat's operations in South America, unprofitable though they are, could possibly have brought down a giant dairy and food company with operations in 31 countries.

Senior executives of the main South American unit, Parmalat Brasil, said they were ''flabbergasted'' and ''overwhelmed'' by assertions that it had helped propel Parmalat's sudden dive into insolvency. As they fight a daily battle to keep Parmalat Brasil running, they expressed fury at the bad news from the home office in Italy. ''What we are reading in the papers should not even be on the business pages, but in the crime section,'' fumed one executive, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Parmalat went on a buying spree here in the 1990's that some in the Brazilian business community called aggressive and others said bordered on reckless, highlighted by a 1998 deal to acquire Batavia, a major dairy cooperative, for $160 million. With little thought given to synergy or economies of scale, the company's empire grew to 17 plants across the country. By splashing out heavily on advertising and marketing, including some prominent sports sponsorships, Parmalat built a strong brand name and rose to second place in the Brazilian dairy industry.

What it did not build was profitability. Parmalat Brasil has lost money every year since 1998, when it first began publishing results. But the company's managers insist that they have been making good progress under Ricardo Gonçalves, who took over as chief executive in late 2001 -- streamlining operations to seven plants, putting more emphasis on higher-margin products like yogurts, cheeses and fruit juices, and narrowing the net loss to $28 million in the first three quarters of 2003, down from $76 million for 2002.

Those losses come nowhere close to explaining the parent company's woes, analysts and executives said. And the units in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela are all considerably smaller operations than the one in Brazil.

''Yes, part of the problems could stem from Latin America, but we're talking about billions of dollars that have disappeared,'' said Rafael Guedes, director in Brazil of the Fitch credit-rating agency. ''It would seem hardly probable that a Latin American unit could produce such a big hole.

More:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9803E2DB1230F930A25752C0A9629C8B63