Qualla: Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations

Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 11 September 1973, tanks rolled through Santiago and Salvador Allende was dead. In Amsterdam, thousands of Dutch citizens who had cheered Chile's reformist experiment now watched on television as it ended in fire and gunfire, and as the names of American multinationals came up again and again in the reporting on who had wanted Allende gone. Out of that anger, in a country half a world away from the coup, a research bureau took shape. They called it SOMO - the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations - and gave it one job: read the paperwork, follow the money, and tell the public what multinational companies were actually doing.

Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations: Founded in Solidarity

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two small Dutch peace and development groups, X-Y Beweging and Sjaloom, paid the first researcher's salary. The premise was modest and a little radical for its time. The activities of multinational corporations had real consequences for ordinary people - in Chile, in the Netherla...

Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations: Around the Works Council Table

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By 1975 SOMO had turned its attention from foreign coups to the Dutch shop floor. When a multinational planned a merger or a restructuring, the works council usually faced a wall of consultants from the company's side and almost no expertise on its own. SOMO began producing compa...

Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations: Following the Chain

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The internet changed what investigative research could mean. By the late 1990s SOMO's work was less about uncovering secret documents and more about connecting public ones - tracing a t-shirt sold in Rotterdam back through a factory in Bangladesh, a fabric mill in India, a cotton...

Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations: Tax Justice and Power

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Some of SOMO's most consequential work has been about an invisible subject: tax. The Netherlands is a hub for corporate structures designed to route profits through low-tax jurisdictions, and for years few Dutch citizens understood the scale of it. SOMO's researchers helped make ...

Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations: An Office, Not a Crusade

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

SOMO operates from offices in Amsterdam as a foundation, a stichting under Dutch law, governed by a small board and funded by a patchwork of subsidies and commissioned research. Staff numbers in the dozens, not hundreds. There are no spies and no stings. The work is, day to day, ...