International

When the city of Hamburg decided to introduce stricter environmental regulations in order to protect, amongst other things, access to drinking water, energy giant Vattenfall registered a protest. The company demanded a cool €1.4 billion, because it perceived the reform as a threat to potential future profits. The case was in the end hastily settled and Hamburg came away with nothing worse than a scare, but the city did readjust its environmental regulations. As a result, the German government was in its turn subject to a legal complaint from the European Commission, on the grounds that the country no longer fulfilled the requirements of the EU Habitats Directive. This is just one of countless examples of investors from outside the country in question claiming enormous damages for the simple reason that a decision, taken democratically, has put downward pressure on its expected profits. Even when this does not lead to an verdict favourable to the plaintiff, it sometimes manages to seriously undermine democracy.