Corporate giants ‘hired spies to join protest groups’

British Airways, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Porsche are among a list of major companies that have been identified as having paid corporate intelligence firms to monitor activists which challenged their businesses.

The revelations, reported by The Guardian, are based on leaked documents from two corporate intelligence companies, C2i and Inkerman Group, and reveal spying activities that took place in the Noughties. RWE NPower, the UK’s fifth-biggest energy supplier, has said in the past it has hired Inkerman.

The surveillance of individuals included the use of infiltrators who joined protest groups to spy.

One of C2i’s targets was the grieving family of Rachel Corrie, an American student protester crushed to death by a bulldozer in Palestine, and local campaigners protesting against phone masts. Corrie’s family sued manufacturing firm Caterpillar, alleging that the firm was complicit in war crimes by exporting bulldozers to Israel, knowing that they would be used to demolish Palestinian homes.

C2i, which was wound up in 2011, also pitched its services to Donald Trump when the US president’s property development firm was looking to create a huge golf course and hotel development on the Scottish coastline. It is not known whether Trump’s business hired the firm.