The Swiss-based multinational company, along with the security agency Securitas AG, which it hired to infiltrate the international organisation ATTAC, has been ordered to pay compensation to the NGO
Nestlé was, along with the security agency it hired for the job, found guilty by a Swiss court of illegally infiltrating an activist organisation called ATTAC last week, and has been ordered it to pay 3,000 francs as compensation to each of the nine plaintiffs (aside from court cost of 14,000 francs), reports Swiss newspaper Le Courrier. The verdict was delivered exactly a year after it was admitted in court. ATTAC has, however, been in court before. The non-government organisation (NGO) was unsuccessful in criminal court in 2009.
The case, now well known as Nestlégate, begins much earlier, in September 2003, when the multinational company, which is not at all new to controversy, hired a person to join the group drafting the book ‘Attac Against the Nestlé Empire’.
Under the fictitious name of Sara Meylan, the spy helped draft the book and even wrote a chapter herself. As spies usually do, “Sara Meylan” then supplied information to Nestlé regarding the contents of the discussions and the physical profiles of each member of the group. This mission lasted until June 2004.
The company, throughout the case, maintained that it had stopped conducting such ‘missions’ in 2005. Yet, ATTAC discovered another employee of Securitas, this time going by her real name, at meetings of one of its working groups. Yet Nestlé and Securitas had claimed that they had stopped the infiltration in 2005.
The Tribunal of the Lausanne district last week, while delivering its judgement, said that the two companies were gathering information “by infiltration of the private sphere” of the activists and held them guilty of “unlawful violation of the rights of the person”.
In a written statement, ATTAC declared, “We wish to stress that we remain very critical of certain behaviour on the part of the multinational Nestlé throughout the world, in particular regarding its hostile policies toward trade unions and its excessive pumping of water.”
Nestlé has yet to delivery a response to its loss in court, but a spokesperson of the company told Le Courrier, “If it should turn out that a Nestlé employee had acted negligently, we shall take appropriate measures.”
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