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Kim is an asylum seeker from Zimbabwe. She lives on about £7-a-day while supporting her small child and is not allowed to work. So, when she received a £10,000 NHS bill for giving birth, she penned the only proposal she thought she could make work, requesting a repayment plan of one penny per month.

Kim's story made one headline this week - in the Guardian, which consistently provides what little proof there is in the mainstream media that women seek asylum at all.

"All the immigrants that we have are MEN!" exclaimed one riled-up TalkTV guest, in a segment titled: 'This Is Going To Make You Choke On Your Cornflakes'. In it, 'health and wellbeing expert' Monica Price seethes about asylum seekers receiving "priority" NHS care, demanding: "Where are all the women and children?!"

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This article is not about the straightforward reasons that elude our media regarding why men disproportionately risk long asylum journeys (far more women and children would starve to death in overcrowded camps, were it not for the funds young men in their families risk their lives to send them).

This article is about the women who break that trend, and the fact our media is as disproportionately silent about female asylum seekers as it is disproportionately noisy about male asylum seekers.

"They'll be showing videos of men on the television that are crossing the Channel, saying, 'oh it's only men'" objected our guest this week, Kim, the 34-year-old mother whose healthcare debt prefaced this column, "but when we sought asylum, it was an all-female group - but that media coverage, it wasn't there."

There's loads of women and children seeking asylum, it's just a myth about only men seeking asylum

Kim, asylum seeker

It is true that some two-thirds of asylum seekers arriving in the UK are men, but the media's fixation on this group, which they have deemed the most problematic and easiest to demonise, means the thousands of female asylum seekers also arriving get almost no coverage at all.

Like Kim, who went from destitution to debt for giving birth with the NHS.

In theory, asylum seekers should be exempt from the 'NHS cost recovery' programme, first introduced by the 2015 Conservative Government to target migrants and overseas visitors. But it is frequently misapplied, explained Judith Dennis, policy lead at Maternity Action, which has documented substantial caseloads with devastating effects.

"Rules are misunderstood, people move around, not of their own volition. One of the things that we need to think about is the mismatch between what people are eligible for and what's actually happening."

Maternity Action is seconding a campaign by the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) to urgently review NHS charging. The campaign has managed to overturn Kim's mistaken charges, but many women are not so lucky, and disappear from the asylum system into the far-darker undocumented world, for fear of being deported over their debt.

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It is just one example of the ways gender and displacement interact to make refugee women as disadvantaged in our society as they are invisible in our media.

When she first became pregnant, Kim delayed seeking medical care for fear of being deported. "It was putting the pre...

This article was originally published in the May 2025 print edition of Byline Times

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Perhaps it's the times we're living through, but I've been thinking a lot about the Devil of late.

I've always been intrigued by the number of times the Devil appears in English place names: once you start to notice, Old Nick appears everywhere.

There are Devil's chimneys, elbows, dykes, ditches, causeways, punch bowls, arrows, quoits, chairs, holes, bridges, pavements, leaps and even pulpits and churchyards.

Being me, I looked for a book on the subject and it turns out there is an excellent one: Cloven Country - The Devil and the English Landscape by Jeremy Harte.

Harte makes the point that the stories that tend to cling to these names are often not much older than the 18th Century and tend to portray the Prince of Darkness as a trickster who is easily outwitted by the ordinary person. This is closer to the Satan of the medieval mystery plays, in which he is often deployed for comic effect, rather than the conflicted fallen angel of Paradise Lost, or the horned and cloven-hooved priapic demon of Catholic imagination.

The idea of evil immanent in a landscape, or of evil concentrated into a single person or being, are probably universal human tropes. The fact that the English landscape's adoption of diabolic names feels more quaint than unnerving tells us more about the way stories are transmitted than anything profound or disappointing about our culture.

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Harte has a lovely insight into this: "Folklore is not a tree but a lattice; stories are continually crossing over and exchanging motifs with each other, developing new variants or dying out, acquiring fresh heroes and forgetting old ones. Stories that were once sacred mysteries have become children's entertainments, and stories told for a joke have been made into foundational myth."

I was thinking about landscapes that still feel genuinely evil when watching Simon Schama's recent BBC documentary, The Road to Auschwitz. Here, properly, was a vision of hell, and seeing Schama force himself to make the journey, struggling as both a historian and a Jew to look at the disgraceful, degrading evidence, to feel his mounting anger - "screw pity!" he spits out at one point - is to be reminded that evil, palpably, exists and must be resisted.

Appropriately, Schama ends his harrowing film with a testimony of a living survivor, Marian Turski, the Polish-Jewish historian who died earlier this year, aged 98.

"Auschwitz didn't fall from the sky", Turski tells us. "Evil comes step by step".

Schama had prepared his viewers for this by showing how it was the complicity of ordinary Lithuanians in Kaunas (where his mother's family were from) and the appropriation of the bureaucratic excellence of the Dutch state that had enabled the systematic extermination of European Jews long before the gas chambers had been built.

If you dehumanise people, if you make hatred acceptable, terrible, unimaginable things can happen. Evil comes step by step.

This feels very relevant to the present moment, in which kindness is mocked as a 'woke religion' and empathy condemned as a form of moral weakness. The Devil doesn't start his work with mass executions and the furnaces of hell, but with the quiet temptation of giving in to intolerance and prejudice.

When the great Jewish-American philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, coining the phrase that has haunted her reputation - "the banality of evil" - she wasn't downgrading Eichmann's guilt or demeaning the suffering of his victims, as some of her critics concluded.

Like Schama, she was animated by rage at the enormity of the Holocaust, at the scale of the moral problem it represented, and by a philosopher's determin...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

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I never thought I'd say it: Thatcher wasn't this bad.

Back then, I was young, eager, and full of anarcho-socialism. Naive, even. I didn't pay attention to the small print of policies - which, I realise with hindsight, were horrific. But our fight was different.

It was the era before the Disability Discrimination Act, the Equalities Act, and the larger reach of the independent living movement. When local authorities kept disabled people's organisations going. Campaigning became activism. The Disabled People's Direct Action Network blocked roads and buses. Some things did change and there was a brief sense of optimism.

Those classed as 'severely disabled' fought hard and agencies such as the Independent Living Fund were established. It wasn't easy, but there was a sense of progress, of collaboration, and even respect.

Then came the modern Conservative onslaught. Work capability assessments and the creation of us as 'frauds' and 'scroungers' in the political culture. We were to blame for austerity.

But the current Labour Government's moral compass is null and void, with its plans to save £5 billion a year by 2030 by tightening the eligibility for the main disability benefit, the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) - which is not means-tested and never has been.

The responses by those in my network echo the depth of my own horror.

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Many are ripping up their Labour membership cards in disgust, in the knowledge that they assisted Keir Starmer's election victory. We are almost beyond processing what is happening.

According to the Disabled People Against Cuts group, "current PIP fraud figures are 0% according to the Department for Work and Pension's 'Fraud and Error in the Benefits System' annual report of 2024, so the Government's crackdown on benefit fraud and its impact is inconsistent with the figures and very low rates of PIP fraud".

Despite Labour's headline-grabbing rhetoric of 'getting disabled people into work', many are terrified that the very support that gives them a chance of finding, or staying in, work, will now be denied.

Similar threats exist in terms of the underfunding of accessible transport, independent living, appropriate care support, and the vastly inefficient Access to Work scheme.

We are, at the very least, being encouraged to believe that no one cares.

Some non-disabled people continue to claim that disabled people are committing fraud when it comes to their right to a mobility vehicle. That we claim disability benefits because we are unfit for work, then dare to, for one moment, stand up from a wheelchair. Or that we put down our crutches and walk. On it goes. I could keep listing the vilification that this Government is plainly supporting and encouraging.

It is brutal to live it - and this is under a Labour Government, which I foolishly believed would be socialist. Its punitive decisions, which do nothing but heighten the scapegoating of disabled people once again, are alarming.

We are surely targeted on the assumption that we're the easiest to hit - alongside the belief, conscious or otherwise, that this is justified.

'Rinsed blue' Labour simply doesn't care, so we find ourselves as not merely the 'useless eaters' of the Nazi era, but demonised in new interpretations as the 'too costly'.

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Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

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Activists from the climate, Palestine and West Papuan independence movements picketed BP's office last night in protest at BP's ongoing sales of oil to Israel and the operation of liquified natural gas fields in West Papua.

The activists gathered in St James Square outside the company's London headquarters on the night before the AGM, holding banners that read "BP fuels Israeli war crimes" and "Stop fuelling genocide and climate breakdown".

Protesters accuse BP of complicity with Israel's war on the Palestinian people through the operation of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline which supplies oil to Israel.

In February this year BP announced that it would be slashing planned investment in renewables and would increase oil and gas investment to $10 billion a year.

It has been alleged by researchers of oil supply chains that oil from the pipeline is converted into jet fuel for F-35s in Israel. The pipeline supplies 28% of Israel's crude oil imports.

The protesters also accused BP of abandoning its climate strategy and criticised it for operating in West Papua, a region considered by many to be under military occupation by Indonesia.

Rosie Latchford of Fossil Free London said "we're here today because it's the eve of BP's AGM […] they've recently just scrapped their climate targets completely, which research has just shown today will lead to 72,000 excess deaths Global Witness found, and they have also been fuelling the genocide in Palestine over the last few years through the BTC pipeline".

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Investor Rebellion

The protesters are not the only people critical of BP's climate targets The Guardian reports that an investor rebellion is brewing and that it is expected that Helge Lund, BP's chair will be voted out following the scrapping of climate targets.

Increasingly climate protest and pro-Palestine protest run together as companies such as BP present targets that can be pressured by both movements.

The XR offshoot Youth Demand has staged a series of actions over the last few weeks blocking roads and creating pickets linking the economy of fossil fuel extraction to Israel's war on the Palestinian people.

Leila Shafiee from Energy Embargo for Palestine a group urging states and companies to prevent the flow of energy to Israel as a means to end the war said that they "demand an energy embargo and the end to BP's complicity with Israel. BP currently fuels Israel's genocide through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline that runs through Azerbaijan and Turkey and this oil is currently 30% of Israel's total oil imports and once that oil is in Israel it is refined into military grade jet fuel. They are also looting Palestinian waters through renewed gas licenses, and this is while Israel is denying basic necessities to Palestinians and has placed a more brutal energy blockade on Gaza".

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Shafiee added "in the wake of the genocide […] the general trade union for the Palestinian Federation released a call internationally for activists, unions and organi...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

Help us build the better media Britain deserves

Sebastian Gorka, Trump's counterterrorism adviser, recently declared on NewsMax that Americans should be sorted into two categories: those who "love the President" and those who are "aiding and abetting" criminals. His rhetoric underscores an increasingly binary worldview in the White House that may soon escalate dramatically - and that other authoritarian regimes have deployed before.

By Sunday, officials in the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security are expected to recommend that President Trump invoke the Insurrection Act, a move that would deploy federal troops for mass deportations. Hina Shamsi, Director of the ACLU's National Security Project, has called the proposal "unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful."

The invocation of the Insurrection Act would further militarise an increasingly unconstitutional and authoritarian state of affairs. Already, Legal foreign students have had their visas revoked for protesting genocide, Armed ICE officers have stormed neighborhoods, hospitals, even elementary schools and due process for deportees has been effectively abandoned. Through it all, White House officials have denied, twisted, or ignored basic facts in service of an increasingly authoritarian vision of state power.

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The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia became symbolic of Trump's shift towards authoritarianism. Deported to a Salvadoran gulag without due process, Garcia has been stripped of the basic liberties guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The administration has made conflicting claims: that he's a dangerous MS-13 gang member (a charge the Fourth Circuit Court ruled has "no evidence"), and simultaneously that his deportation was an "administrative error." Despite a unanimous 9-0 Supreme Court ruling ordering the White House to "facilitate and effectuate" Garcia's return, the US Government has made no effort to comply.

Instead, Trump met with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and ominously warned that "homegrown" American criminals may be next, suggesting Bukele might need to build "about five more" CECOTs. Bukele, whose Government Amnesty International describes as engulfing El Salvador in a "human rights crisis", told reporters that to "liberate" 350 million Americans, you'll "have to imprison some."

Legal analyst Chris Geitner has described Garcia's detention as part of a broader strategy: "a Schrödinger's box - quite literally, the CECOT prison is that box - where anyone can be sent under an agreement between the US and El Salvador, at which point the US Government can claim it no longer has any authority, because the person is in the custody of a foreign sovereign."

"If they can get Abrego Garcia out of the box," Geitner writes, "the plan does not work."

Barbara McQuade, former US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, echoes Geitner's concerns: "Like anyone in the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, Abrego Garcia is entitled to constitutional protections, including due process, which means notice and an opportunity to be heard before our liberty can be taken from us."

"By spiriting him out of the country without either, he was denied that right. And if he can be denied that right, then so can any of us."

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Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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The COVID Inquiry just completed four weeks of hearings centred on the controversial procurement decisions made by Boris Johnson's Government during the pandemic.

Of particular interest was the use of a VIP lane by the Cabinet Office and Department for Health and Social Care to procure PPE - a system that fast tracked offers from politically connected companies, many of whom had never previously supplied PPE to the NHS.

The previous Conservative Government was forced by the Good Law Project to reveal the names of the suppliers who benefited from the VIP Lane, and in November 2021, finally published the list of 51 names following a long-running battle.

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However, those 51 suppliers declared by the DHSC may just be the tip of the iceberg.

In February 2022, Good Law Project was leaked internal DHSC documents that suggested a further 18 companies benefited from the VIP Lane, but this was dismissed by the DHSC which claimed: "It is inaccurate to claim that all of these companies were referred to by the High Priority Lane route."

But, new evidence published by the COVID Inquiry and analysed by the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition (UKACC) now supports the initial claims made by GLP and in fact goes one step further to reveal the names of at least "20 other suppliers who received 48 contracts worth £1 billion" Via the VIP route.

Half a decade on we still don't know the scale of the VIP lane operation

Gavid Hayman, executive director of open contracting partnerships and co-chair of the UKACC told the inquiry that "we are still not sure we have got to the bottom of all those VIP contracts".

He added: "It appears that the evidence to the Inquiry on VIP Lane suppliers from DHSC conflicts with that of the Cabinet Office.

"The Cabinet Office evidence appears to omit 20 other suppliers who received 48 contracts worth £1 billion according to the DHSC evidence. I am not sure who is right but it is bad that we still don't know for sure five years on. Hopefully, My Lady, you will get to the bottom of it."

The contradicting evidence provided by the Cabinet Office and referred to by the UKACC is in the form of a detailed spreadsheet now made public by the inquiry for the first time.

Remarkably, every PPE supplier awarded a contract by the Government during the pandemic can then be filtered into "VIP" or non-VIP categories, revealing the names of potentially 20 new VIP suppliers.

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These 20 suppliers went on to secure PPE contracts valued at £1 billion according to a detailed review conducted by UKACC.

But the confusion doesn't end there…

To date, the names of 51 VIP lane suppliers have been made public by the DHSC. However, earlier in the month, the Government's former Chief Commercial Officer Gareth Rhys Williams confirmed to the inquiry that yet another company had mistakenly been missed off the list.

That company was Luxe Lifestyle, a previous investigation by the Good Law Project revealed that Luxe were awarded a £20 million PPE deal following an intervention by former Conservative Party Ministers and Chairman Greg Hands.

Rhys Will...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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The UK Government has been criticised by leading NGOs and Sudanese Civil Society organisations for failing to include any Sudanese organisations in the much-vaunted Sudan summit in London this Tuesday.

The conference was organised by Foreign Secretary David Lammy and co-hosted with France, Germany, the EU and African Union for the second anniversary of the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) a paramilitary organisation that has attacked the non-Arabic ethnic groups in Darfur.

The conference followed a weekend of brutal massacres of civilians by the RSF in refugee camps around Darfur with 300 killed according to the UN, and the mass displacement of up to 400,000 civilians from the Zamzam refugee camp and the city of El-Fasher.

Both warring parties were excluded from the conference as were members of Sudanese civil society.

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At an event previewing the conference, aid and human rights NGOs operating in Sudan criticised the exclusion of Sudanese civilian advocates.

Dr Eva Khair, director of Sudan Transnational Consortium told members of the press "to see more agency going to backers of the conflict than to any single Sudanese voice, that's really concerning".

The groups emphasised that the focus had to be on civilian protection and encouraged the Government to take "low hanging fruit" such as restoring telecommunications to areas of Sudan that are under blackout.

The communications blackout makes it very difficult for aid workers to operate and severely limits the ability of civilians to access money.

The NGO PAEMA (Preventing and ending mass atrocities) said one goal of the conference should be to "restore telecoms access across all of Sudan to enable the timely and accurate documentation of serious violations of human rights".

PAEMA and another NGO Avaaz took out an ad in the Financial Times this morning urging David Lammy to take steps to break the blackout.

Yasmine Ahmed, Human Rights Watch UK Director said "this has been, and continues to be, a war on civilians. Civilians are not just collateral damage, this is targeted violence against civilians […] For two years millions of civilians have desperately called on the international community to take concrete measures to protect them, and to date the international community has utterly failed them. The consequences of this failure is playing out today in El-Fasher and the two displacement camps around El-Fasher".

At the opening of the conference David Lammy and his French and German counterparts Jean-Noël Barrot and Analena Baerbock announced aid packages of £120 million and €125 million respectively.

The United Arab Emirates, a key military and financial ally of the RSF attended the talks.

The UAE has been accused of secretly funnelling guns to the RSF via Chad, a charge which it had strongly denied, however a leaked UN report seen by the Guardian revealed several flights from the UAE in which transport planes made apparently deliberate attempts to avoid detection as they flew into bases in Chad.

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Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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Help us build the better media Britain deserves

"In a quiet suburb, a loving couple runs an art agency, raises kids, and kills for the FSB," says a Ukrainian officer, in a balaclava, as he talks at a secret location near the frontline, with drones whizzing above and artillery shells whistling by.

He pulls up a quote on his phone: "The Russian world is everywhere there is Russian influence, in one form or another: cultural, informational, military, economic, ideological or humanitarian… The extent of our influence varies greatly from region to region, but it is never zero. So we will spread out in all directions, as far as God wills and as strong as we are."

"The former aide to Putin, Vladislav Surkov, said this, and he's not joking," says another officer. "We are here to give an urgent warning to the free world."

Byline Times presents an exclusive interview with Ukrainian "Elves" unit officers, revealing how Russia infiltrates democratic societies and why - and how - the West must fight back. "Elves" is a nod to Tolkien's warriors in an existential war of light against darkness, where the stakes are nothing less than the fate of the free world.

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How it Worked

Infiltration is a long-standing tactic: like all spies in human history, Kremlin operatives create a cover identity to embed agents within foreign countries or high-value targets. The Elves have been countering Kremlin infiltration campaigns for decades.

Russian agents infiltrated Ukraine - and the Kherson region - in two stages.

In 2001, a wave of immigrants from Russia entered Ukraine, claiming to be fleeing criminal threats. Wealthy businessmen set up companies, bought properties, flaunted expensive lifestyles, and then switched to politics. This was a classic infiltration strategy - gaining economic and political influence under false pretences.

More agents were cultivated locally. The key collaborator in the Kherson region, Volodymyr Saldo, exemplifies a long-term "sleeper agent" placed by Russian intelligence. He rose through Kherson's construction sector during the USSR era, switched to politics in 2001, served as mayor of Kherson three times in 2002 - 2012, and later as a member of parliament with the pro-Russian Party of Regions. When the Russians captured Kherson in 2022, they appointed Saldo the head of the Kherson administration and "Governor" installed by Russian occupational forces.

The now-deceased deputy to Volodymyr Saldo, Kirill Stremousov, a public figure and provocateur turned journalist-collaborator, presents an example of the second wave of agent recruitment, which came in 2010 - 2012, ahead of Crimea's annexation. Russia's oil wealth funded large-scale influence operations. The Kremlin agents gathered intelligence and identified key figures to recruit and bribe. After the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, when the Ukrainian Government established Anti-Terrorist Centres (ATC) to fight the Kremlin invasion, Russian intelligence managed to recruit several heads of ATCs and the Ukrainian secret services (SBU). Stermousov was then under the protection of one such double agent, Ihor Sadohin, head of an ATC and a senior SBU officer. After the 2022 full-scale invasion, Stremousov openly worked for the occupying forces until his suspicious death on 9 November 2022. Sadohin was arrested in Ukraine on suspicion of treason in 2022.

Good "legending" allows Russian agents to gather intelligence and establish networks without scrutiny. The Elves are stil...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

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A small group of "super investors" composed of asset managers and powerful investment firms - is quietly fuelling the global oil industry's retreat from climate targets, according to a new report by the Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice at Queen Mary University of London, shared exclusively with Byline Times.

The report, Toxic Investors: The Dirty Dozen's insatiable drive for oil and gas profits, reveals that BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, the so-called "Big Three" asset managers, have dramatically increased their shareholdings in the world's 12 largest publicly listed oil and gas companies, dubbed the "Dirty Dozen" by the report.

Collectively, these three investment firms now own more than 18% of the total shares of these companies, a 30% increase on their holdings at the time of the Paris Agreement of 2015.

Ownership of fossil fuel companies is increasingly concentrated in the hands of just 25 companies, according to the report.

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Over the past three years major US oil companies Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Conoco Phillips have increased their oil production.

In 2024 BP scrapped its target for a reduction in oil production and Shell downgraded its climate targets, halving its plans for reducing oil output from 2% to 1% a year.

"The world's biggest oil and gas companies have been retreating from their climate commitments and are planning to increase fossil fuel production," said co-author of the report Bill Spence, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Queen Mary university of London. (QMUL)

"They're doing this in the service of their largest shareholders - firms that most people have never heard of, but which wield enormous power behind the scenes."

The report uses original analysis of Capital IQ shareholder data to track how ownership has shifted since 2015. It shows that the number of investors required to form a controlling stake, i.e. more than 50% in these companies has dropped from 37 to just 30 on average.

Citing lawsuits by Republican states against BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, over claims that they promote "a destructive, politicised environmental agenda", the report argues that the repeal of climate targets by big oil companies and the increased investment by these firms should be "seen in the context of an international, largescale pushback against attempts to limit fossil fuel exploitation and profits".

Professor of Climate Justice at QMUL, David Whyte, one of the report's co-authors, said "political leaders are currently showing unprecedented support for Big Oil, and appear to be weakening the transition to a low carbon economy. This evidence shows that the financial elite has at the same time hugely extended its capacity to profit from oil in the decade since the Paris Agreement. If we really want to 'drain the swamp', we need to start with the big asset managers who are able to keep getting richer and richer by increasing fossil fuel production".

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He added that "this story also tells us that international law is failing the planet. As political leaders line up to condemn 'woke' policies, it is clear that our climate policies ha...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

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Polina Zabrodskaya is a woman used to toxicity. She grew up against a backdrop of industrial decay in the city of Tula, Russia - an infamous environmental disaster zone south of Moscow. Black deluges, sludge rivers and chemical slimes were her childhood realities - visible scars left by factories that, at least on paper, adhered to the strictest of environmental regulations.

"Two hundred factories, if memory serves," she told Byline Times in her North London home. "Usually, all that environmental damage is hidden elsewhere. In my case, it was obvious. Dead rivers, poisoned soil beyond recovery, black snow. Diseases through the roof."

It was a poisoned childhood that profoundly influenced her - a raw awareness of the environmental impact of industrialism, and the human costs found between the immediacy of manufacturing pollution and the distance of corporate lies.

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"This disconnect between promises and environmental damage was so obvious very early on," she says today from her quiet living room, noteworthy for its order and minimalism.

The environmental devastation was to become deeply personal. "My mum and grandma passed away from cancer. Not surprising. It's very hard to prove (a link). Even if contamination and pollution are proven, there is still plausible deniability."

Zabrodskaya left that poisoned town and eventually settled in the UK, building a successful career in advertising. She became a Creative Partner at Abbott Mead Vickers (AMV) BBDO, drawn initially by the firm's public commitment to ethical practices and environmental responsibility. But her faith began to unravel when she was tasked with leading a global environmental sustainability campaign for Galaxy chocolate, a brand owned by the global, family-owned company Mars, Incorporated.

Mars considers itself an ethical company. In 2019, for instance, it noted on its website that "for the second year in a row, The Ethisphere Institute has named us to their list of the 2019 World's Most Ethical Companies." Mars did not make it on the 2025 list.

Perhaps that fall from grace was part flagged in 2023, when a report by Ethical Consumer (EC) criticised Mars, as well as the leading chocolate brands Cadbury, and Nestlé, for having inadequate ethical standards in their cocoa supply chains. Only 17 out of 82 companies the EC investigated reportedly paid cocoa farmers enough to live on and concerns were raised about child labour in the cocoa industry, particularly in West Africa.

Today Mars promises a golden ticket of hope on its website: "We take responsibility without being asked. We support the responsibilities of others."

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Zabrodskaya might disagree.

"Sometimes you look at what you're being asked to advertise, and things don't add up," she says. Tasked with amplifying Mars' sustainability claims about cocoa production, she claims to have soon found jarring contradictions.

"If I'm asked to advertise marginal efforts like building schools in West Africa, the first question is why can't they build their own schools? Why do they need a white saviour? When you Google cocoa environment sustainability, the first things that come up are… extreme poverty, exploitation, deforestation. You see that systemically no progress is bein...