Alston & Bird

// personhood? see alaso mcconn covid liability immunity

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/corporate-lawyers-openly-discuss-suing-nations-over-profits-lost-to-covid-19-measures-ticking-time-bomb/

Corporate lawyers openly discuss suing nations over profits lost to COVID-19 measures: ‘Ticking time bomb’

no lnx

Jake Johnson / Common Dreams May 21, 2020

Prominent corporate law firms representing major businesses in the United States, Italy, Spain, and other nations are openly discussing the possibility of companies using a secretive and notorious legal process to sue countries over future profits lost due to government efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

On Monday, the non-profit research group Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) documented numerous examples of high-powered corporate law firms—including Ropes & Gray, Alston & Bird, and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan—publicly licking their chops over the lucrative opportunity presented by the Covid-19 crisis and government attempts to fight it.

Ropes & Gray wrote in an alert on its website on April 28 that “for companies with foreign investments,” the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system enshrined by thousands of trade agreements across the world “could be a powerful tool to recover or prevent loss resulting from Covid-19 related government actions.”

“Governments have responded to Covid-19 with a panoply of measures, including travel restrictions, limitations on business operations, and tax benefits,” the alert reads. “Notwithstanding their legitimacy, these measures can negatively impact businesses by reducing profitability, delaying operations, or being excluded from government benefits.”

Lawyers from Sidley, a firm headquartered in Chicago, wrote on May 8 that “where a company prevails in its investment treaty claims, it may be able to recover all the losses that flowed from the government measures that damaged the company.”

CEO noted that the ISDS system hands “sweeping powers to foreign investors, including the peculiar privilege to sue states in an arbitration court system.”The ISDS chapter of the Trans Pacific Partnership was one of the most widely denounced components of the 12-nation trade deal that was ultimately never ratified by the U.S. Congress.

“In ISDS tribunals companies can claim dizzying sums in compensation for government actions that have allegedly damaged their investments, either directly through expropriation or indirectly through regulations of virtually any kind,” CEO wrote. The number of ISDS suits has skyrocketed in the last decade, and so has the amount of money involved.”

The research group highlighted several scenarios in which corporations could challenge countries over coronavirus-related government actions, including lowering drug prices, reducing rent and utility bills, temporarily nationalizing private hospitals, and providing access to clean water.

An Alston & Bird lawyer said during a recent webinar that “governments… forcing producers to sell drugs at significantly discounted prices and/ or taking the intellectual property for themselves and/or disseminating that intellectual property to third parties without permission”constitute “takings”that could be challenged under existing investment treaties.

“The lawyers’ enthusiasm is not based in fantasy,” CEO wrote. “In the past 25 years over 1,000 known investor-state lawsuits have been filed. Investors have won a significant amount of ISDS claims as arbitral tribunals ruled that it was illegal to interfere with prices of essential goods, restrict or tax the export of vital products, roll back incentives to investments—and the list goes on.”

“As states struggle with the pandemic and with rebuilding their economies,” the group warned, “ISDS cases could mean huge extra financial burden.”

CEO

@corporateeurope

In the midst of the #COVID19 crisis, corporations are preparing to sue states over pandemic measures.

Our latest report reveals how lawyers urge big business to defend its profits and challenge the emergency measures with #ISDS cases. https://corporateeurope.org/en/2020/05/cashing-pandemic-how-lawyers-are-preparing-sue-states-over-covid-19-response-measures … #stopISDS

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David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, wrote Wednesday that progressives have long viewed ISDS as a disastrous system that allows powerful corporations to “lock in a low level of regulation or extract cash if any country dares to try to protect their citizens.”

“It’s so unbelievably shocking to see corporate lawyers actively discussing having foreign investors use ISDS to challenge countries over their coronavirus lockdown measures, and try to extract ‘expected future profits’ from them,” Dayen wrote.

“There is no example yet of a foreign investor filing such a claim,” Dayen added. “This bears watching, or maybe a pre-emptive strike to defuse this ticking time bomb. Incidentally, the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment has proposed an ISDS moratorium during the pandemic.”

David Dayen

@ddayen

If this is at all true it means that corporations will sue in extrajudicial super-courts for the expected profits they had to forego when countries put lockdown measures in place.

Oh. My. God.https://corporateeurope.org/en/2020/05/cashing-pandemic-how-lawyers-are-preparing-sue-states-over-covid-19-response-measures …

Cashing in on the pandemic: how lawyers are preparing to sue states over COVID-19 response measures

As governments take action to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and prevent economic collapse big law firms urge corportions to challenge governments' emergency measures in order to defend its profits. In...

corporateeurope.org

The Transnational Institute (TNI), a think tank based in Amsterdam, is calling on governments to “take urgent action to make sure that transnational corporations and investment lawyers do not become beneficiaries of this pandemic, at the expense of people’s well-being and health.”

In an April 20 report, TNI urged nations to:

Suspend all trade and investment treaty negotiations;

Take all necessary steps to terminate (unilaterally or multilaterally) existing treaties;

Institute a comprehensive review (cost-benefit analysis) of their current and planned investment agreements;

Withdraw consent to ISDS, to limit immediate exposure to investor lawsuits;

Default on the payment of outstanding debts as a result of ISDS awards. Or, at least, discuss ISDS debt relief and/or debt restructuring with creditors.

“Just as the pandemic is revealing profound health inequities and the dangers of agro-industrial food systems, it is also showing the dangers of trade and investment systems that put corporate profits above health and life,” TNI researchers wrote. “There is no place for trade and investment agreements that allow investors to profit from suing countries in crisis or seeking to cash-in from scarce public resources.”

mofo's

Law and lobbying firm Alston and Bird, which employs former Kansas Republican Sen. Bob Dole, directed a $1 million donation from an unknown source to Project Veritas in 2019, according to The New York Times. The firm lobbied the federal government on behalf of corporate fossil fuel and health care clients including ConocoPhillips, Cheniere Energy, trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans, and CVS Health in the second half of 2019.

http://www.alston.com/professionals/paul-beard/

:{// schiff pleg

ormer GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole has signed up another foreign client, according to a Justice Department filing made Wednesday.

Dole, who is special counsel at the law and lobbying shop Alston & Bird, is dipping his toe back into the troubled waters of the Balkans: He’ll be representing the foreign ministry of Kosovo, providing strategic consulting “in connection with deepening and expanding Kosovo’s bilateral relations and relations with international institutions, assisting in security and economic development initiatives, and fostering enhanced foreign direct investment and trade opportunities.”

What that means exactly is unclear. But Dole is an old friend of Kosovo, having advocated for U.S. intervention on its behalf during its war with neighboring Serbia in the late 1990s and flying to Pristina in 1999 to convince ethnic Albanians there to sign a peace deal. Dole has been registered to lobby for Kosovo in the past, but not since the early 2000s; the nation has other representatives on the payroll in Washington.

But things are getting hot again in that part of the world. A recent decision by Kosovo to appropriate all immovable property previously belonging to the former Yugoslavia or Serbia didn’t help. The country’s leaders were ordered this month to continue European Union-facilitated talks aimed at normalizing relations with the Serbs. But that’s a tall order, and Kosovo has announced it will transform its security force, which doesn’t have much heft, into an army, which doesn’t bode well for continued (relative) peace in the region.

The U.S. ambassador in Kosovo reportedly has warned authorities there against the militarization.

Serbia is one of the few nations that has refused to recognize Kosovo’s independence, declared in 2008.

Kosovo may have been drawn back to Dole by his well-publicized success acting on behalf of Taiwan, culminating in an unorthodox call between President-elect Donald Trump and the Taiwanese president last fall. The phone call stirred up controversy about its break from decades of diplomacy based on the U.S.’s “One China” policy, and China’s main daily newspaper put an angry editorial about the event on its front page. Dole received $140,000 from May to October for his work.

Also on the Kosovo account for Alston & Bird is Robert C. Jones, the head of the firm’s lobbying shop and a former counsel to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Other than his work for Taiwan, Dole, who was a Republican House member and then senator from Kansas from 1961 until his resignation in 1996, has been light on foreign clients in recent years. One exception (cue the conspiracy drums): the Russian Federation, which he represented in 2014 through a contract with Ketchum, the public relations firm long used by Russia. He was paid $15,000 for that work.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/03/bob-dole-signs-up-another-foreign-client/

Categories: Foreign Lobbying

Tags: Bob Dole, kosovo, russian federation, taiwan

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ton & Bird has a nationwide environmental litigation practice. Our team, which includes litigators in Atlanta, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., has decades of experience at both the trial and appellate levels. Our experience runs the gamut from complex, multiparty Superfund litigation to citizen suits brought under the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and RCRA. We also routinely defend claims brought under National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Our lawyers defend clients against toxic tort claims as well, including claims for personal injury and property damage from alleged exposure to chemicals and other toxins.

Alston & Bird's environmental litigators also have helped shape key principles of environmental law through over 25 published federal and state environmental cases. This extends to several precedent-setting cases under various federal statutes, including Meghrig v. KFC Western, Inc., holding that a claim for cost recovery is not available under RCRA; Carson Harbor Village, Ltd. v. Unocal Corporation, holding that NCP compliance is a prima facie element of a CERCLA cost recovery claim; Wilshire Westwood v. ARCO, holding that a CERCLA petroleum exclusion covers crude oil, refined petroleum products and additives indigenous to the refining process; and Solutia v. McWane, holding that a party with standing to bring a CERCLA contribution claim is barred from also asserting a cost recovery claim.

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http://www.:{sourcewatch.:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:org/index.php/Alston_%26_Bird

Alston & Bird describes itself as a "major U.S. law firm with an extensive national and international practice and 675 attorneys in five major markets".[1]

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Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals

In September 2004, the firm "signed a number of new pharmaceutical companies and healthcare groups after hiring two key players from last year's Medicare reform act." The key players are Thomas Scully, the former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator , and Colin Roskey, former Senate Finance Committee counsel. A&B's new clients include Jerome Stevens Pharmaceuticals of Bohemia, New York; Adams Laboratories of Chester, New Jersey; Mylan Laboratories of Morgantown, West Virginia; HealthSouth, a healthcare services company; and the American Clinical Laboratory Association, a trade group.[2]

Indonesia

In December 2003, Alston & Bird registered as an agent for Yohannes Hadrian Widjonarko, who is commissioner of P.T. Pacific Barito Timber, an Indonesian forestry company. According to the filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act(FARA), A&B's role is to promote positive developments in Indonesia to "U.S. policymakers, and opinion-shapers in the print and broadcast media, think tanks and academia."

Atrazine

In August 2003, Syngenta Crop Protection hired the firm to lobby on the safety of one of its products, the herbicide atrazine. Atrazine has been linked to human prostate cancer, cancer in laboratory animals, and reproductive system abnormalities in frogs and other animals. The chemical has been banned in the European Union. [3]

Over a year and a half, Sygenta spent $260,000 on the lobbying campaign, focusing on the Environmental Protection Agency, White House officials and members of Congress. Alston & Bird special counsel (and former Senate Majority Leader) Bob Dole set up at least one White House meeting to lobby on atrazine. The EPA concluded hat it found no studies "that would lead the agency to conclude that potential cancer risk is likely from exposure to atrazine." [4]

Other Clients

DP World

Contact information

http://www.alston.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=main

External links

Frederic Frommer, "Company spent $260,000 lobbying for herbicide," Associated Press, October 27, 2004.
Business & Lobbying, The Hill, September 28, 2004.
"Indonesia wants better ties", O'Dwyers PR Daily, January 27, 2004.

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Syngenta's Massive Lobbying Keeps Carcinogenic Corn Pesticide on Market

Posted on Wed, Oct. 27, 2004

Company spent $260,000 lobbying for herbicide

:{FREDERIC J. FROMMER

Associated Press}:

:{WASHINGTON - The manufacturer of a herbicide that has been linked to frog

deformities has spent $260,000 lobbying the Environmental Protection Agency

and other government officials, an Associated Press review of disclosure

forms shows.}:

:{Syngenta Crop Protection, which makes the herbicide atrazine, enlisted

former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole to meet with White House officials on

at least one occasion. Dole represents the U.S. affiliate of Swiss-based

Syngenta as well as the Kansas Corn Growers.}:

:{In Minnesota this week, Democratic state Sen. John Marty, chairman of the

Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee, said he might push for a

ban on atrazine, citing research that the chemical causes deformities in

frogs and poses other health hazards.}:

:{In August 2003, the U.S. affiliate of Swiss-based Syngenta Crop Protection

hired Alston & Bird to lobby for the registration of atrazine, which had

been challenged by environmental groups such as the Natural Resources

Defense Council.}:

:{Dole, a special counsel at the firm, met with White House Deputy Chief of

Staff Joe Hagin soon after to discuss the registration process.}:

:{According to an Alston & Bird memo prepared before that meeting, which was

obtained by the NRDC under the Freedom of Information Act, Alston & Bird

said that EPA should reregister atrazine by Oct. 31, 2003.}:

:{EPA did just that, concluding in a statement that it found no studies "that

would lead the agency to conclude that potential cancer risk is likely from

exposure to atrazine."}:

:{Dole spokesman Mike Marshall said in a statement that Dole "is a credible

voice for the Kansas Corn Growers and their coalition. Alston & Bird, which

has experts in this type of work, has helped the Kansas Corn Growers and

Syngenta with the re-registration process."}:

He declined to answer specific questions about the lobbying effort.

:{According to disclosure forms, Syngenta paid Alston & Bird $180,000 in

lobbying last year and $80,000 in the first half of this year. Alston & Bird

lobbied the EPA, the White House, the Justice Department and Congress during

the 11-month period, the forms show.}:

:{At Monday's Minnesota Senate hearing, University of California-Berkeley

biologist Tyrone Hayes testified that low levels of atrazine "chemically

castrate and feminize" male frogs, fish and other wildlife. Students first

noticed deformed frogs in 1995 in a farm pond near Henderson, Minn.}:

:{Other tests suggest that men who work near the chemical have a higher risk

of prostate cancer, Hayes said, while others make a link between atrazine

and cancer in laboratory animals.}:

:{Atrazine was banned last year by the European Union, but Syngenta says the

product is safe. According to the company, atrazine is used on two-thirds of

the corn grown in the United States and on 90 percent of the sugar cane.}:

---

Fred Frommer can be reached at ffrommer(at)ap.org

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