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TTIP Corporate Empowerment Map

The 81,000 Companies that Could Attack Clean Water Safeguards, Green Energy Policies and Wall Street Reforms

A “trade” deal only in name, the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership would grant foreign firms the power to directly attack domestic health, financial, environmental and other public interest policies that they view as undermining new foreign investor privileges and rights that TTIP would establish. TTIP would empower individual foreign corporations to drag the U.S. and European Union (EU) governments before extrajudicial tribunals, comprised of three private attorneys, that would be authorized to order unlimited taxpayer compensation for domestic policies or government actions seen as frustrating the corporations’ “expectations.” The amount would be based on the “expected future profits” the tribunal surmises that the corporation would have earned in the absence of the public policy it is attacking.

This extreme “investor-state” system already has been included in a series of U.S. “free trade” agreements, forcing taxpayers to hand more than $475 million to corporations for toxics bans, land-use rules, regulatory permits, water and timber policies and more. Just under U.S. pacts, more than $58 billion remains pending in corporate claims against medicine patent policies, pollution cleanup requirements, climate and energy laws, and other public interest polices. The EU is proposing for TTIP an even more radical version of investor privileges than that found in past U.S. pacts.

TTIP would triple the United States’ exposure to investor-state attacks against U.S. policies. TTIP would newly empower more than 3,500 EU parent corporations, which own more than 26,000 U.S. subsidiaries, to launch investor-state cases against the U.S. government. A mere 18 EU parent corporations currently have that power under existing U.S. pacts. Even if you count all corporations in all countries covered by U.S. investor-state pacts, the combined number of firms that can currently launch investor-state cases against the U.S. government is about 1,300 firms (which own about 10,000 U.S. subsidiaries). In one fell swoop,TTIP would roughly triple U.S. investor-state liability.

TTIP would also expose the EU to a potential wave of investor-state cases from any of the more than 19,000 U.S.-based corporations that own more than 54,000 subsidiaries in the EU. About nine out of ten of these corporations would by newly empowered by TTIP to launch investor-state cases against EU governments.

Below are the maps of the locations of multinational corporations that would get these new privileges if TTIP would take effect. Zoom in using the “+” button to see which corporations could challenge zoning, environmental and other local policies in your community. Click on the dots to see the names of the corporations and their industry. The color of the marker indicates the country of the parent company. The red lines on the map are the borders of the districts of the U.S. House of Representatives. Click here for a full list of companies based in EU countries that operate in the United States, sorted by congressional district.

  = Corporation based in France   = Corporation based in another EU country
  = Corporation based in the U.K.   = Corporation based in Spain
  = Corporation based in Germany   = Corporation based in Italy
  = Corporation based in the Netherlands   = Corporation based in Sweden
  = Corporation based in Austria   = Corporation based in Belgium
  = Corporation based in Poland

Below is a map of U.S. corporations operating in EU countries that would gain greater rights than domestic firms under TTIP. Zoom into a specific country by double clicking on the map to view the corporations located there.

Most TTIP countries have hundreds of foreign corporate affiliates that would gain new rights under the deal’s expansion of the investor-state system. The table below lists the number of U.S.-owned firms in each EU country and the total number of firms in the United States owned by corporations in EU countries. The EU countries already covered by U.S. investor-state pacts include: Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. Corporations in those countries own just 33 of the 27,124 U.S. subsidiaries listed below.

Number of U.S. Corporations in EU Countries &
EU Corporations in the U.S.

Austria 879
Belgium 1,519
Bulgaria 251
Croatia 190
Cyprus 127
Czech Republic 911
Denmark 909
Estonia 126
Finland 809
France 7,399
Germany 7,166
Greece 703
Hungary 611
Ireland 1,263
Italy 4,155
Latvia 119
Lithuania 144
Luxembourg 221
Malta 65
Netherlands 2,471
Poland 1,578
Portugal 937
Romania 518
Slovakia 304
Slovenia 130
Spain 3,893
Sweden 2,067
United Kingdom 15,133
United States 27,009

This table indicates, for example, that 907 U.S. corporate affiliates are established in Austria, while 27,124 corporate affiliates from EU countries are established in the United States.

The source of much of the information in the maps is Uniworld’s foreign firms database.