However, Halliburton’s illegal activities really came into their own when Dick Cheney became its chief executive in 1995. While Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton, it was involved in a cover-up of its widespread use of asbestos, a bribery scandal in Nigeria, a corruption scandal in Indonesia, and the poisoning of communities in New Mexico and Texas among others.
Of course, Halliburton is most famous for the war-profiteering racket that Dick Cheney’s position as vice president enabled when the U.S. illegally invaded Iraq in 2003. Halliburton reaped a nearly $40 billion profit from the contracts it received following the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Halliburton has also been accused of racial discrimination, gender discrimination, and of being viciously anti-union. In one case, taking place in Iraq, a female worker for a Halliburton subsidiary was gang-raped by her co-workers and Halliburton tried to cover it up. They tried to intimidate the female worker after the crime took place by trapping her in a shipping container without food or water for 24 hours.
14. Bayer AG
A well-known and global pharmaceutical brand, Bayer’s first patented product was heroin, which they marketed to children around the world for decades as a cough medicine free of side effects, despite the dangers of addiction. Bayer soon established themselves as the dominant pharmaceutical company in Europe after trademarking aspirin a year later. However, Bayer then became involved in the manufacture of chemical weapons, including the invention of chlorine gas in World War I and its founding of a “School for Chemical Warfare.”
During World War II, Bayer – as part of the now defunct conglomerate IG Farben – produced all of Nazi Germany’s explosives and used more than 83,000 forced laborers and concentration camp inmates in its factories. They also financed torture in concentration camps and manufactured the infamous Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide that claimed the lives of over a million people in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Majdanek. Bayer has since resumed production of Zyklon B.
