Yet again, London-listed Vedanta Resources, and its head honcho Anil Agarwal, have fallen foul of international standards.

Last week, its VAL subsidiary in Orissa had prestigious awards withdrawn - almost at the last minute - by two UK safety watchdogs. See: Vedanta Aluminium's Indian safety record is tarnished

Now we learn that two global industry organisations also pulled their nomination of Mr Agarwal on learning about his company's sullied record - this time as a "leader" in promoting "business ethics".

Agarwal's gong was to have been bestowed on him (and six other candidates)  by the Oslo-based Business for Peace Foundation (BfPF) on 7 May 2012.

Assisting BfBF in drawing up the nominations was the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) following a search "for outstanding business people who have been able to achieve business success while acting in an ethically responsible way".

Just not cricket!

Not to be confused with either the International Criminal Court, nor the International Cricket Council, the ICC claims to be "the world's only truly global business organization".

It's therefore quite significant that the body sanctioned the withdrawal of Agarwal's award.

Nonetheless, we're disturbed to find that professor Muhammad Yunus was one of the two members of the award-giving selection committee.

As founder of world-renowned Grameen development bank in Bangladesh, Yunus should surely have kept a closer watching brief on what his fellow South Asian capitalist has been up to in recent years.

We only learned of this additional humiliation of Mr Agarwal late last week, when sent a press release by Amnesty Norway, dated 7th May 2012 - the day the award was due to have been made.

However, judging from a 17 April statement [see below], both the ICC and BfPF had  decided to cold-shoulder Vedanta's executive chairman at least a month earlier.

It's strange that the two organisations failed to reveal Agarwal's exclusion at that time.

Indeed, they continued announcing there'd be seven recipients of the awards, even though only six were mentioned by name and Agarwal's wasn't among them.

No way, Norway

Secretarial slips are one thing. The BfPF itself made a much worse error of judgment when agreeing to Agarwal's nomination in the first place.

Based in Oslo, the Foundation required only a brief call on Norway's Ministry of Finance to discover that Vedanta had been ejected from the government's investment portfolio, back in November 2007.

The company's "grossly unethical" conduct was condemned by Norway's Council on Ethics, which also determined that this wasn't likely to change. See: Norwegian government indicts Vedanta as "grossly unethical"

From what we've gathered, it was thanks only to protests by Amnesty Norway that the BfPF gave Agarwal the boot last month.

The London-based Indian billionaire isn't thought to have set foot in Norway at any point over the past four years.