The Oily Truth
This ad was paid for by Amnesty International volunteers to raise awareness about the unethical actions of Oil Company Shell. It was meant to be printed by the Financial Times today, but at the last moment, it was pulled. The Metro and Evening Standard have no problem with this ad, it is just the FT that has seen fit to censor the truth about one the world’s biggest and perhaps most unethical oil companies.
Tim Hancock, Amnesty International UK’s campaigns director, said:
“The decision by the Financial Times is extremely disappointing. We gave them written reassurances that we would take full responsibility for the comments and opinions stated in the advertisement. The money to pay for the advertisements came entirely from more than 2,000 individuals online, who we’d asked to fund an ad campaign targeting Shell’s AGM – and it really caught their imagination. And I am sure these supporters will share with us our sense of deep disappointment.”
Shell’s $9.8bn profits come at a terrible cost for the people who live in the Niger Delta, who have to drink polluted water, breath in air that smells of oil and gas, eat fish that are contaminated, tend and farm land that is unfit and spoilt due to Shell’s actions. Shell refuses to adequately clean up oil spills and take care of the over damages that the company does while working in the Niger Delta.
Shell needs to clean up its act and it will only do this from pressure from the rest of the world. The FT should have printed this, the FT and the rest of us need to do more to make Shell responsible for the actions in the Niger Delta.
For more information please go to the Amnesty International Website
