Manchester, England - Information on the ethical records of the UK's top 25 corporate donors to charity is now available on the internet, free of charge. Access to this information will enable a wide range of different users to scrutinise the true CSR or ethical records of some of the UK's largest organisations such as Unilever, Marks & Spencers and Northern Rock plc.

Ethical Consumer Information Systems' (ECIS) stand at the Charity Fair exhibition this April were presented with the league table, which gave an overall score for generally poor ethical performance in a variety of ethical categories. The league table was based upon the Ethiscores compiled by the organisation's Corporate Critic database, and a listing from the Directory of Social Change's table on corporate financial donations published in its recent edition of 'The  Guide to UK Company
Giving 2005'.

As Rob Harrison, Special Projects Director at ECIS says: "Fundraisers were surprised if not alarmed to discover that some leading corporate donors had poor ethical records in unexpected areas. Accepting money from such companies could present long- term reputational problems for charities". The Ethiscore is derived from the frequency and severity of ethical criticisms filed against a company in seventeen broad ethical categories. These include environmental reporting, pollution, workers' rights abuses and animal welfare issues.

Notes to Editor:
ECIS has substantially lowered the subscription prices to the Corporate Critic database in the last month.

The Top 10 UK Corporate Charitable Donors (A snapshot)

Note: The company Ethiscores are out of a total of 15. The lower the score, the worse the ethical performance.

Corporate Critic is a database containing information on the behaviour of over 30,000 companies. It holds data on companies
from anywhere in the world - from small independents to large multinationals.

Users of Corporate Critic can customise and weight the Ethiscores in order to reflect their own organisation's ethical criteria and concerns.

Please visit: www.corporatecritic.org for further information.

Corporate Critic presents users of the database with a valuable opportunity to perform quick and thorough checks on the true ethical records of corporations. This facility is used by a wide range of different users such as charities, the media, government, investors, environmental/CSR consultants and practitioners and commercial organisations. 

Ethical Consumer exists to promote universal human rights, environmental sustainability and animal welfare by providing information on consumer issues which empower individuals and organisations to act ethically in the market place.

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