The Classic Rich Guy

Mittal


Steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal paid $1 to 5 million to the Clinton foundation. (Lakshmi Mittal among Clinton foundation donors)

Mittal's group took over what remained of Bethlehem Steel.

Lakshmi Mittal owns the Taj Mittal, a mansion in London.

Mittal's $229 million dollar 12-bedroom home in Kensington Palace Gardens in West London

Mittal is the boss of ArcelorMittal, the world's largest steel company.

Employees of Mittal have accused him of "slave labour" conditions after many deaths in his mines. (UK’s richest man in slave labour row - Times Online)

During December 2004, twenty-three miners died in explosions in his mines in Kazakhstan caused by faulty gas detectors.

Headquarters of ArcelorMittal in Luxembourg (photo by Werneuchen )

In 2002 UK Member of Parliament Adam Price exposed the link between Tony Blair and Mittal in the Mittal Affair, also known as Cash for Influence.[6][7] [8]

Mittal's LNM steel company, registered in the Dutch Antilles and maintaining less than 1% of its 100,000 plus workforce in the UK, sought Blair's aid in its bid to purchase Romania's state steel industry. [9]

The letter from Blair to the Romanian government, a copy of which Price was able to obtain, hinted that the privatisation of the firm and sale to Mittal might help smooth the way for Romania's entry into the European Union.[6]

The letter had a passage in it removed just prior to Blair's signing of it, describing Mittal as "a friend."[10]

In exchange for Blair's support Mittal, already a Labour contributor, donated £125,000 more to Labour party funds a week after the 2001 UK General Elections, while as many as six-thousand Welsh steelworkers were laid off that same year, Price and others pointed out.

David Pallister, in The Guardian (UK) 2 October 2006, wrote:

"A damning report on Mittal Steel's acquisition of an impoverished African country's iron ore reserves is published today, accusing the world's largest steelmaker of offering an inequitable 'raw deal' that has created an unaccountable "state within a state".

"The report by the campaigning group Global Witness says that Mittal's strategy in the west African state of Liberia is a 'case study in which multinational corporations seek to maximise profit by using an international regulatory void to gain concessions and contracts which strongly favour the corporation over the host nation'.

Another Mittal mansion in London.

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