DAVOS, Switzerland--Tokyo Electric Power Co. was voted the world's second most irresponsible company in a poll by Greenpeace and other nongovernmental organizations at the World Economic Forum here.
DAVOS, Switzerland--Tokyo Electric Power Co. was voted the world's second most irresponsible company in a poll by Greenpeace and other nongovernmental organizations at the World Economic Forum here.
TEPCO was among six companies selected for the Internet vote because of its failure to prevent catastrophe at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant in March last year.
A nomination statement said: "The company also provided information that was verifiably false or very late in coming. A culture of favors, cover-ups and falsifications reigns at TEPCO."
The Public Eye Awards announced at the Davos forum by Greenpeace and other NGOs target companies judged to have been most irresponsible in terms of human rights and the environment.
This year, 88,000 votes were submitted. TEPCO got about 24,000, just short of the 25,000 or so votes accumulated by Vale, the Brazilian natural resources company. Vale won the dubious honor of world's most irresponsible company in part because it forced 40,000 residents to move without compensation to make way for a dam project on the Amazon River.
The six companies in the vote were selected among 40 designated by nongovernmental organizations around the world.
Samsung Electronics Co. of South Korea placed third for allowing factory workers to handle toxic materials without informing them. In fourth place was Barclays Bank of Britain, which was blamed for causing famine among the world's poor through its speculative futures trading in food products.
Joseph Stiglitz , a Columbia University professor who has won the Nobel Prize in economics, was at the news conference announcing this year's awards.
Stiglitz said that while individual companies could not take all the blame for the state of the global nuclear power industry, where government subsidies are running out of control, he expressed his hope that the awards would serve as a wake-up call to the parties concerned.