WWF splits over links to corporations

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2003:

GENEVA, Switzerland–World Wildlife Fund U.S. president
Kathryn Fuller has reportedly refused to resign at request of WWF
International president Claude Martin.
Martin asked Fuller to quit after she abstained from voting
in her capacity as a board member of Alcoa, rather than oppose a
company plan to build a dam complex that will flood 22 square miles
near Karahnjukar, Iceland, submerging nesting and feeding areas for
barnacle and greylag geese who migrate from Greenland to Britain.
The dam project is opposed by the Royal Society for the Protection of
Birds and the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, as well as by WWF
International.

Fuller joined the Alcoa board after Alcoa donated $1 million
to WWF-U.S., wrote Severin Carrell of the London Independent.
Martin and WWF International were meanwhile ripped in an open
letter from Kevin Dunion, former director of the Friends of the
Earth chapter in Scotland, for failing to oppose a plan by the
French mining, quarrying, and cement-making firm Lafarge to open a
“super quarry” on Harris Island in the Hebrides. Lafarge and WWF
also have a “very close” relationship, Dunion said.
WWF-Britain came under criticism at the same time for its
ties to the HSBC banking empire, a major financier of rainforest
logging in Indonesia and dam-building in fragile areas including the
Three Gorges region of China.