Oily Fingers?

Splashed below the fold on the front page of The Wall Street Journal today is a piece on how Irving-based ExxonMobil may have sparked an Internal Revenue Service audit of Greenpeace, challenging the environmental organization’s tax-exempt status. The spark: a letter to the IRS from Public Interest Watch, a group that styles itself a watch dog of non-profits. According to the WSJ, a letter was sent from PIW to the IRS in September 2003 charging that Greenpeace, which has labeled ExxonMobil the world’s No. 1 climate criminal, had laundered nearly $25 million in tax-deductible contributions–one month after Exxon began dispersing $120,000 in contributions to PIW, or 97 percent of PIW’s funding for the period ending July 2004. Upshot? Greenpeace was cleared by the IRS, and its tax-exempt status was left unchanged. Now I’m as willing as the next Clooney to attribute all global evils to Big Oil and revel in oily conspiracies big and small–even as we guiltlessly demand and guzzle its products. But this is a front-page story? –Mark Stuertz