Catalog 2012

For a long time, China forged itself a role of sub-contractor, attracting multinationals from across the globe. As in the United States and in Europe, companies laid off massively, their relocation to China enabled them to make huge profits thanks to a cheap workforce. These multinationals' practices taught the Chinese a lot. Today, with the power of 2,800 billion euros in foreign currencies,...

Every year, the average person in France eats 34 kg of sugar - twice as much as 15 years ago. 80% of the sugar we consume is hidden in everyday foods, like ‘healthy’ breakfast cereals, yoghurts or ready meals. For the past decades, the sugar lobby has been on the offensive. Not only are consumers being misled about the quantity and form of sugar in their diets, but the effects of sugar on our...

3 destinies, 3 perspectives, from the forbidden country of the Arab Revolution. A country that has been forgotten by the West. These images are extremely rare. Outstanding, clandestinely filmed footage. In the last year, the repression has caused more than 70 deaths. That is a lot for this small country with a population of 600,000, run by the Al Khalifa royal family. The people of Bahrain are...

Most of us have never heard of high-frequency trading. Yet, many experts predict that the next financial crisis will probably be caused by this new Wall Street made practice. Thousands of interconnected computers are buying and selling thousands of stocks each and every micro-second. With no human control or regulation. We delve into a mad financing world dominated by machines, or rather, by...

Are companies like Apple and Samsung designing expensive electronic products, built to fail? Every year, shinier, slicker new models are released to encourage us to upgrade. But it’s not enough just to persuade consumers to buy more and more: they have to be forced to upgrade. From the iPod and iPhone, designed with an integrated battery that cannot be changed by the user, to Samsung TVs built...

More and more companies are resorting to neuromarketing. This controversial practice involves studying consumers’ brains, analyzing how and why they respond to certain stimuli, in order to influence their decisions. It’s based on the idea that 90% of our decisions are made at a subconscious level. If a brand can speak directly to our "gut instinct", bypassing reason, more of its products will...

Over the past ten years, the price of clothes has fallen by 13%. But who has been paying the price? Can the ethical claims of the big brands be trusted? From the exploitation of children and workers to forcing labourers to work in dangerous conditions and violating local and international laws, it seems many manufacturers are still reliant on sweatshop models of production. In this exclusive...

In association with BBC Panorama, we investigate the world of tax havens and show how some of the world’s most famous companies are using a tax haven at the heart of Europe to save millions in tax. Secret documents reveals how companies like GlaxoSmithKline have been getting big tax breaks on billion pound transactions in the tiny country of Luxembourg. By opening offices there, diverting...

Big brands have suddenly become environmentally responsible. Or have they? At any rate, they are proudly showing off their newfound commitment in their ads and packaging. Some have even invented “green labels” to grant them more credibility and sell more products. And yet, the activities of the very same virtuous, eco-friendly companies question their commitment to the environment. We...

To sell a cure, first you need to sell the disease. According to some research, pharmaceutical companies are medicalising normal conditions, like the menopause, promoting non-existent diseases, and transforming mild problems into serious conditions that need treatment. Twenty years ago, few people worried about their cholesterol level. Today, thanks to the pharmaceutical companies, high...

Imagine how, in the future, those of us who are better off will live in private villages surrounded by security fences. On the outside dwell the poor. A ghetto for the rich and a ghetto for the poor. These two-tier cities and societies are likely to prove one of the key challenges of the 21st Century. Science fiction? No. All over the planet this new way of living is already being...

The Enquiry The Arab revolutions owe a lot to the Internet. They are the first horizontal wave of insurrections without a true leader where information spread at great speed on networks and social media. Powers' abuses were systematically recorded by mobile phones and broadcasted on the web, resulting in a strong international reaction and giving western democracies even less excuses to sit...

Mehmet is 40 years old and lives on borrowed time. He suffers from silicosis, an incurable disease that has vanished in Western Europe with the closing down of coalmines. But in this poor neighborhood of Istanbul, where we already filmed two years ago, we found dozens of other victims like Mehmet. All of them have poisoned lungs, polluted in the clandestine sweatshops manufacturing jeans,...

After ten years the euro, it has to be said, has not lived up to its promises. Throughout the euro zone, mistrust towards the single currency is steadily increasing. Today many Europeans have grown to dislike the euro, disapproving the authorities' decisions and policies. They accuse the euro of having pushed up prices and undermined purchasing power. Europe is going through the worst economic...

Wildenstein is a name that towered over the art world for more than 40 years. Regarded as the greatest art dealer of the 20th century, Daniel Wildenstein, a discreet man, possessed more than 10,000 pictures at the height of his career. But since his death in 2001, the Wildenstein name has been linked to what could be one of the largest episodes of tax evasion of the past decade. A part of the...