5th October 2023

Dear Fellow Petitioners

As promised (and as you can read below) I have now written to Hein Schumacher, the CEO of the 50-billion dollar company Unilever, to inform him of the more than 5,000 of you to date who have signed this petition regarding his refusal to halt Unilever operations in Russia. I hope it's self-explanatory.

I have yet to receive a reply (or acknowledgement) from Mr Schumacher, but as you can see from the screenshot attached, he has opened the email (twelve separate times over four days), so has the Unilever Consumer Affairs office (twice over over four days) and so has the Unilever Press Office (no less than eighty three times over four days). 

So there is no question, your voice HAS been heard

I hope the email to Mr Schumacher prompts the response we all want - in short, for Unilever to leave Russia until Putin's murderous and unprovoked war is at an end. To be fair to Mr Schumacher, and as I have made clear to him below, I will post any reply he or Unilever makes verbatim.

The BBC and all of the broadsheet UK national newspapers have been kept informed. So has every single UK Member of Parliament. 

We can only hope Unilever finds the moral where-with-all to stop paying the Putin regime tens of millions of dollars in taxes - as it has been so far. As Catherine Bennett in the UK Observer newspaper pointed out, Unilever's taxes equate to "39 bullets per second" to murder innocent Ukrainian men, women and children. 

Your voice is not alone

You should all know that the petition signatories so far have mostly been from the UK. But several hundred also came from (in no particular order): Australia, the Czech Republic, Malta, Malaysia, Holland, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Nigeria, Sudan, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. 

How can you continue to help?

Firstly, please continue to support this campaign by sharing our petition on any social media platforms you can. The petition link is here:
https://www.change.org/p/unilever-must-stop-funding-putin-s-war-on-ukraine 

Secondly, if you are from the UK, please write to your own MP today. 

You can find out your Member of Parliament's email address here: https://members.parliament.uk/members/commons

Thirdly, please encourage everyone you know to boycott all Unilever products until it reverses this terrible policy. Those products include:

Marmite, Persil, Dove, Knorr, Domestos, Hellmanns, Lipton, Wall’s, PG Tips, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, Magnum and Lynx

This multi-billion-dollar company can and must leave Putin's Russia

I will write again with any further developments.

Best wishes, and thanks again for your support for the people of Ukraine

Mark Birkett
Rochdale, England

+++++++++++++

PETITION: Boycotting Unilever For Supporting Putin's War On Ukraine
To: Hein Schumacher, CEO Unilever
Bcc: All Interested Parties / Unilever Press Office
Bcc: All UK MPs
Bcc: The Guardian / The Times / Daily Telegraph
Date: Tuesday 3rd October 2023
Re: Petition to Stop Unilever Supporting Putin / Letter to Unilever CEO Hein Schumacher
URL: https://www.change.org/p/unilever-must-stop-funding-putin-s-war-on-ukraine

Mr Schumacher,

I am writing to you today on behalf of over 5,000 signatories. Each of them signed a petition which I set up on Wednesday 30th August 2023. That petition was designed to raise awareness of, and protest against, Unilever's continued operations in Russia. 

As you know very well, since you are the CEO who invented that policy, Unilever has been widely and rightly criticised for its failure to leave Russia since its illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As a result of Unilever staying in Russia, continuing to make and sell its products there, it has paid the Putin regime there many tens of millions of dollars in taxes.

This in turn has helped Vladimir Putin to pay for burning down Ukrainian villages, towns and cities. Your company has also directly helped to fund the Wagner Group, a proscribed terrorist organisation which has butchered countless innocent Ukrainians. Your company's actions have thus directly helped Vladimir Putin's terrorist thugs to rape Ukrainian women, burn Ukrainian children to death, torture countless Ukrainian men and cause immeasurable environmental harm to Ukraine as a whole.

We petitioners are rightly utterly disgusted by Unilever;

Whilst thousands of other companies rightly left Russia in 2022 and 2023 (and lost money doing so) Unilever has repeatedly refused to do so. Your company has since issued various hand-wringing statements pretending that Unilever is acting in a moral and decent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

The UK and EU sanctions against Russia are there for a simple reason; to put pressure on Russia to end its horrific war. Yet you continue to justify Unilever paying for all of this brutality because you claim that to leave Russia would somehow harm your employees there, or risk assets falling into Putin's hands. These excuses fool no-one. This argument - that retaining a few thousand employees in Russia somehow justifies Unilever contributing to all this death and destruction - is utterly abhorrent.

According to The Guardian newspaper;

"Unilever’s Russian operations paid 3.8bn roubles, or about £30m, in corporate taxes in 2022, which is partly why the Ukrainian government has called the parent company a “sponsor” of war. It’s a label that, you would think, would cause Unilever’s board to worry about the effects on the much-prized corporate values and long-term goodwill"

According to The Observer newspaper;

"Unilever products pay for 39 bullets every second [in Ukraine], but still it boasts how ethical its products are"

The Boycott:

All of this is why we, the 5,000+ petitioners to date, collectively urge you to reconsider this policy immediately. In the meantime, we will continue to urge consumers across the UK and internationally to boycott all the Unilever products shown below. 

Summary:

If you do reply to this letter, you have my word I will make sure all 5,000 petitioners are informed of it verbatim. And I will continue to keep the UK press informed (inc. The Times, The Guardian, Daily Telegraph), and every last British MP informed as well, as I have already been doing thus far.

We all look forward to your earliest reply

Sincerely,

Mark Birkett
Rochdale, England

[ADDRESS SUPPLIED]