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Vulture Funds Bill Second Reading
Dear CSM Members,
‘Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Bill’
Second Reading, 26th February
We are well aware that the CSM has always been a strong supporter of Jubilee and write to you now to ask you to encourage support among your members for the ‘Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Bill’, which will receive its second reading on Friday 26th February.
“World poverty is one hundred million mothers weeping, because they cannot feed their children” (Ronald Sider, ‘Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger’), but one of the most effective developments to address this scourge in recent years has been the substantial reduction in the debt burdens of many poor countries.
Unhappily, ‘Vulture Funds’ are using this opportunity to profiteer from the suffering of others. Buying up defaulted poor country debt at knock-down prices, they sue for full repayment when countries receive debt relief, often making vast profits in the process. Thus Donegal International sued Zambia from $55 million in 2007, for debts originally owed to Romania and which the company had purchased for $3.2 million. They were awarded $15.5 million by the court – $15.5 million freed up by debt relief, which Zambia had earmarked for health care for its rural poor. Similarly, only last November, two vulture funds took Liberia to court in the UK, where they were awarded $20 million against what is one of the world's poorest countries.
In this way such companies not only bring misery to the most vulnerable people in the world, but also thwart the will of the international community by siphoning off resources provided by the tax payers of developed countries for debt relief and poverty reduction.
The bill would protect countries which have gone through the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative (HIPC) by curbing the activities of these funds and has been designed specifically not to cause problems for the secondary debt market.
We are informed that a simple majority on 26th February will not be enough - one hundred MPs will need to vote for the bill, with no objections, in order for it to pass.
The Conservative Peer, Lord Griffiths, formerly Head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit, put it perfectly not only for compassionate conservatives, but for sincere believers of all political persuasions: “Global poverty as we see it today – the billion plus people who live on less than a dollar a day – is totally unacceptable to any practising Christian”. It is indeed, but so are (or should be) the systems of financial injustice which exacerbate it!
We hope you will feel able to use your good offices to ensure a positive outcome to this exemplary initiative.
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Jubilee Debt Campaign, 24/02/2010 |
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