Introduction   Unilever - Cleaning up in Africa   Unilever - Power in Ghana   Gazprom - The world's largest gas company   Gazprom - Modernising a giant   Levi's - Dilemmas in denim   Levi's - Balancing ethics with profit   Shell - Green or mean   Shell - Future considerations   Solectron - The invisible multinational   Solectron - Re-inventing itself		Unilever - Power in Ghana Unilever maintains manufacturing facilities in around 90 countries around the world. In some countries it has become a central pillar of the economy, and even of the nation as a whole. In Ghana, the government specifically constructs economic policy with reference to Unilever's corporate strategy. The influential force Unilever is able to exert raises an important question. Has Unilever become too powerful, an echo of the British and Dutch empires during whose time it established its wide geographical reach? JH Mensah, Ghana's former finance minister and now the chairman of the country's economic management team, told the BBC how important Unilever is in his country. "When you talk about drawing up a national plan”, Mensah says, “if you do not know what Unilever's investment intentions are for the next three years, drawing up a national plan is just an exercise in fanciful thinking". Mensah insists that the proper boundaries are maintained between government and business. Unilever might be given tax or other concessions if it helped fulfil government policy. But these would only be granted with the approval of parliament, he maintains. For its part, Unilever Ghana's chairman Ishmael Yamson says that when the company talks to government it is merely arguing its case on how official policy affects its business. "Those things that have an impact on Unilever's business in Ghana, I'm very keen to be there, to be part of the discussion”, Yamson asserts. “Otherwise I would blame myself when the laws are being made if I didn't take up the opportunity to let my views and the views of Unilever known to whoever is going to write the law. So I think from that perspective you can still be part of the discussion and not be a politician." But there are accusations against Unilever beyond its relationship with the Ghanaian government. Rudolph Amengan Etoyo, of the development pressure group ISODEC, argues that as a thriving foreign company, Unilever dwarfs its local competitors to the extent that they can never grow big enough to become major businesses in their own right. Etoyo says that "because of the huge space that they occupy, our economy is virtually mortgaged to them. So in terms of our national priorities and national capacity, we probably never will have any indigenous capacity in the areas that they occupy because they will compete them out." Unilever insists that it does face tough competition, particularly from Asia, and even from places like Sierra Leone. And it's evident on market stalls around Accra that, while Unilever products often dominate, there are a variety of brands on offer. In Ghana the economy has traditionally been overly dependent on commodities such as cocoa. The fact that Unilever operates here with an almost exclusively Ghanaian management and workforce, and is one of the biggest contributors of tax revenue to the Ghanaian exchequer, gives it a strong argument that it puts more into Ghana than it takes out.

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