AT THE end of January the Guardian reported all kinds of bad financial behaviour at chocolate-maker Ferrero.

I would just like to add one thing to its report: Ferrero has a former senior Tory Cabinet minister on its payroll. Yet again this shows that, where we find companies behaving badly, we often find Tories.

As the Guardian reported, the sweet-making company is having a fat-cat moment. Giovanni Ferrero, son of the company’s founder, is paying himself and his family a €642 million (£542m) dividend. 

This is one of the biggest-ever European corporate pay days. Ferrero is already Italy’s richest man, but he is about to get richer. 

The main reason for his riches is his surname, so this is a stark illustration of the inequality and oligarchic tendencies of modern capitalism.

Second, as the Guardian also reported, Ferrero UK pays very little tax in Britain. 

Ferrro has not paid British corporation tax for some years. In the latest results, the firm says it did pay £110,000 tax — which is pretty low considering it sold £419m worth of chocolates and confectionery in the UK. 

Ferrero’s profits are low in part because the firm pays a £334m “cost of sales” charge to Ferrero’s holding company in low-tax Luxembourg. 

So the money flows from Britain to a low-tax jurisdiction. As the Guardian pointed out: “Tax experts have accused the company of structuring the business in a ‘complex manner’ in order to pay as little tax as possible.”

This is the kind of one-rule-for-the-rich stuff that makes many people angry, but also appears to attract Tories: Lord Strathclyde, a Cabinet minister until January 2013 and Tory leader in the House of Lords, became a paid “consultant” to Ferrero UK in 2014, a post he still holds.  

Any Tory minister looking at cracking down on low-tax corporations has an obvious disincentive to do so — these people will give you jobs in the future.

Strathclyde has been a Tory lord since he was 26, having inherited the post from his father, who was both a baron and Tory MP. 

He held various Tory ministerial positions under Margaret Thatcher and John Major before becoming a Cabinet minister under David Cameron. 

So he is not an expert in chocolates, but he is an expert in Tory governments. 

Which is handy because Ferrero has good reasons to want to understand and be able to speak to government. 

Ferrero’s sweet products regularly face restrictions on advertising, as governments try to deal with the obesity crisis. 

Ferrero makes Nutella, which it likes to advertise as a healthy hazelnut-based spread. But it contains a big lump of palm oil and lots of sugar, so has faced lots of regulatory problems over advertising. 

Its other products, like Kinder Surprise eggs and the “You are spoiling us, ambassador” sweets, face similar problems.  

So having a Tory ex-minister on hand is useful to the corporation.

For his part, Lord Tom Strathclyde seems to specialise in working for the corporate ugly brigade.

Strathclyde is also the chairman of Raytheon UK, the British arm of the US arms-maker. 

Their British-made products include the Paveway IV bomb, which it sells to Saudi Arabia, which in turn uses it in its war in Yemen.  

So Strathclyde is an adviser to the firm making Kinder Eggs, a sweet for children, and Raytheon, which makes bombs that blow up children. 

Strathclyde has also been an adviser to the Battersea Power Station Development Company. This firm, led by big money Malaysian investors, is turning the iconic London power station into luxury flats. 

The development has been criticised for its lack of “affordable housing” and is a prime example of foreign investors turning London into a playground for the rich, forcing out ordinary folk.

To top it all, Strathclyde is an adviser to Trafigura, a company that has faced multiple scandals.  

Trafigura is a commodities trader, buying, selling and shipping oil and other commodities around the world. 

In 2006 people in the Ivory Coast complained that Trafigura had dumped waste chemicals around their capital city, Abidjan. 

Locals, supported by the UN, said the resulting poisonings led to thousands being taken ill and some deaths. 

In 2009 Trafigura paid £30m to settle the court case brought by the Ivorian people. 

A Dutch court found Trafigura guilty of illegally exporting toxic waste from Amsterdam and concealing the nature of the cargo, fining the firm €1m.

More recently, last November Swiss prosecutors searched the offices of Trafigura and other commodity trading firms as they investigated the Brazilian “car wash” scandal into a vast network of corruption around Brazil’s state-owned oil firm, Petrobras. 

In a sort of backwards way, Stratchlyde’s many jobs show that there is pressure on corporate misbehaviour, over unhealthy foods, the arms trade, housing, pollution and corruption.  

There is enough public anger for these corporations to want to hire political “insiders” to guard their backs. There is also a regular supply of right-wing politicians willing to take the job.

A Parasite to welcome

IT’S always heartening when politically critical art does well. The awards for Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, a very blackly comic thriller — almost horror film — about class in South Korea will hopefully put this excellent film on more screens. 

It’s a kind of upstairs-downstairs drama, where the people upstairs are having a lovely, self-indulgent and self-deluded time, while the people downstairs — literally forced into basements — are scrabbling around as best they can. 

One of the striking, true and sad points in the film is that the people with very little end up fighting most with the people who have nothing, while the people who have everything float above them.