American Corporate Idol

Forget American Idol and Dancing With the Stars—here’s the contest you’ve been waiting for: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce 2008 Corporate Citizenship Awards. According to a press release put out by the Chamber, the awards “recognize companies, chambers of commerce, and business associations for making positive contributions to their communities, advancing important economic and social goals, and demonstrating ethical leadership and sound stewardship.”

The Chamber has just announced the finalists for each of the award categories. The winners in most of the categories will be chosen by “a panel of distinguished leaders in the field of corporate citizenship,” including Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter, past winners and the board of directors of the Chamber’s Business Civic Leadership Center.

Let’s focus on the Large Business Award, which is given to companies with annual revenue of more than $5 billion. Although the public is not invited to vote in this category, we can cheer on our favorite contestant—once we figure out which one that should be. Let’s mull that over.

One of the most familiar names among the finalists is Verizon Communications, a telecom behemoth with $93 billion in revenues. Although the company’s traditional phone service business is highly unionized, its Verizon Wireless and Verizon Business units have vehemently opposed organizing drives by their employees.

Another finalist is Bank of America, which is now the parent of Countrywide Financial, the poster child for predatory mortgage lending currently being sued by various states for deceptive practices. B of A itself paid $460 million in 2005 to settle charges related to its marketing of WorldCom securities just before the scandal-ridden company filed for bankruptcy.

Also competing is Siemens USA, the American subsidiary of German industrial engineering giant Siemens AG. The parent company has been embroiled in a major bribery scandal that has resulted in the resignation of various managers, including some who have been convicted of misuse of funds.

Then there’s KPMG, one of the Big Four auditing and tax advisory firms. In 2005 more than a dozen of KPMG’s executives were indicted for promoting fraudulent tax shelters. The firm itself reached a deferred-prosecution agreement with the Justice Department but had to pay $456 million in fines.

The last finalist is known mainly to truck drivers. Pilot Travel Centers operates more than 300 truck stops in 41 states. It’s amazing to learn that this seemingly modest business has annual revenues of more than $13 billion. There’s not much objectionable about Pilot (except perhaps the fast food), but it turns out that Pilot is half-owned by Marathon Oil. In addition to having been identified as a potentially responsible party at ten different toxic waste sites, Marathon was one of a group of oil companies that agreed earlier this year to pay a total of $423 million to settle charges that they contaminated public water supplies with the gasoline additive MTBE.

Decisions, decisions. Should we go with the (alleged) union-buster, predatory lender, bribe-payer, tax cheat or polluter? Perhaps it’s best that the judging is being done by professionals, who are best equipped to appreciate the contestants’ unique qualities.

Shell’s Troubled Relationship with the Truth

Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell is facing accusations that it manipulated a supposedly independent environmental audit of a huge Russian oil and gas project in which it is involved. Nick Mathiason of the British newspaper The Observer reports that he obtained dozens of internal e-mails showing that Shell officials in London sought to influence the conclusions of a review of Sakhalin II being conducted by AEA Technology. The audit was used by financial institutions in making funding decisions about the $22 billion project.

The Observer quotes Doug Norlen of the group Pacific Environment as saying: “Shell stage-managed the whole process. They set the agenda, scheduled meetings and even participated in the editing of sections. I believe this to be a stark and vivid example of manipulation.” The Shell website contains a page on which it touts the favorable findings of the AEA report.

Pacific Environment, a non-profit advocacy organization based in San Francisco, has done pioneering environmental work on the Russian Far East and Siberia, collaborating with Russian activists who formed Sakhalin Environment Watch. The groups have been highly critical of the offshore Sakhalin II project because it threatens the survival of the world’s most endangered species of whales—Western Pacific Grays (photo). The campaign has pressured Shell and its partners to adopt stronger environmental protections or abandon the project.

The campaign became more complicated in late 2006, when Shell was forced by Russia to sell half of its holdings in the project at a bargain-basement price to Gazprom, which is publicly traded but controlled by the Russian government. This gave Gazprom a majority stake of 55 percent, with Shell’s interest reduced to 27.5 percent. The holdings of the other partners, Mitsui and Mitsubishi, were also slashed.

In its diminished position, Shell was even more vulnerable to attacks in the Russian and foreign press in mid-2007 after it was revealed that David Greer, the deputy chief executive of Sakhalin II, had sent out a motivational memo to his staff containing unattributed passages taken from a speech made by U.S. General George S. Patton on the eve of D-Day in 1944. Amid the ensuing furor over plagiarism, Greer resigned.

Shell’s integrity problems are not limited to Sakhalin II. In January 2004 the company admitted that had overstated its proven petroleum reserves by 20 percent. It later came out that that top executives at the company knew of the situation two years before it was publicly disclosed. Shell ended up paying penalties of about $150 million to U.S. and British authorities for the misreporting.

In his Observer article, Mathiason notes that environmental campaigners are worried that Shell’s behavior with the Sakhalin II report could be repeated in audits involving other projects such as its oil drilling leases in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea. Given the company’s troubled relationship with the truth, that concern is quite legitimate.

Will Xcel Settlement Lead to Meaningful Climate-Change Risk Disclosure?

Utility holding company Xcel Energy is getting lots of free publicity this week, since its name is on the arena in St. Paul, Minnesota where the Republican Party is holding its national convention. Last week, the company was being named in a different context.

While much of the attention of the country was focused on the Democratic National Convention, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that Xcel had settled litigation brought against it by the state by agreeing to disclose the financial risks that climate change poses to the company and its investors. Minneapolis-based Xcel is itself a major contributor to global warming thanks to its ownership of more than a dozen coal-fired electric power plants in states such as Colorado, Minnesota and Texas.

Last year, Cuomo launched an investigation of Xcel and four other energy companies — AES, Dominion, Dynergy and Peabody — that were building new coal plants around the country. In Xcel’s case, the plant is Comanche 3 in Colorado (seen above in an Xcel photo simulation), which is expected to be completed next year. The probe was based on New York’s Martin Act, the same securities law that Cuomo’s predecessor Eliot Spitzer used in prosecuting Wall Street investment banks and major insurance companies.

The settlement with Xcel (the cases involving the other companies are ongoing) is a milestone in the effort to get publicly traded companies to reveal more about the potential financial consequences of climate change. Cuomo’s use of his prosecutorial powers is only one front in that effort. Institutional shareholders, working through the Investor Network on Climate Risk, have been pushing companies through shareholder resolutions while urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to mandate better disclosure. At the same time, the Carbon Disclosure Project is urging large companies to directly report their estimated CO2 emissions.

Under the settlement with Cuomo, Xcel will be required to include in its annual 10-K filing with the SEC a discussion of financial risks relating to:

  • present and probable future climate change regulation and legislation;
  • climate-change related litigation; and
  • physical impacts of climate change.

In addition, Xcel will have to provide various climate change disclosures on its operations, including:

  • current carbon emissions;
  • projected increases in carbon emissions from planned coal-fired power plants;
  • company strategies for reducing, offsetting, limiting, or otherwise managing its global warming pollution emissions and expected global warming emissions reductions from these actions;
  • and corporate governance actions related to climate change, including whether environmental performance is incorporated into officer compensation.

Although Cuomo’s agreement with Xcel applies only to that company, it could give a boost to other efforts to get large corporations to own up to the financial and other consequences of the growing climate crisis.

For this to happen, shareholder activists and others have to make sure that when companies accede to demands for climate-risk disclosure the result is meaningful. Xcel’s last 10-K filing, issued before the settlement, refers to climate change and emphasizes the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. When mentioning the New York State case, the company thus argues that it is already making the disclosures sought by Cuomo. Yet its main emphasis in the 10-K is on reassuring investors that the company is prepared for climate change, while there is no acknowledgment that building new plants such as Comanche 3 is exacerbating the problem. That’s not risk disclosure—it’s corporate spin.

If this same sort of rhetoric and evasion appear in the company’s next 10-K, let’s hope Cuomo prosecutes Xcel for violating the settlement agreement.