Wednesday 6 May 2009

STEPHEN LADYMAN MP DEMANDS AN END TO DEBT “VULTURES”

Stephen Ladyman, the MP for South Thanet, has joined the Jubilee Debt Campaign to stop vulture funds profiteering from Third World debt.

Stephen is supporting a bill being presented to Parliament to stop financial institutions from making multi-million pound profits out of the debts of some of the poorest countries in the world.

The Developing Country Debt (Restriction of Recovery) Bill, a ten minute rule bill with cross-party support, is presented in Parliament tomorrow (Wed April 6th). In recent years at least 54 companies are known to have taken legal action against 12 of the world’s poorest countries. Most notably the vulture fund Donegal International, based in the British Virgin Islands, won $15.5 million through the courts in repayment for Zambian debt it bought for $3.3 million.

The Bill provides for:
An end to hedge funds and other investors buying up Third World debt at cut-rate prices and then suing developing country governments through the UK courts for the full amount.
Reporting arrangements to the UK and developing country governments.
Transparency over who is involved in the funds.
Anti-corruption measures.

Stephen Ladyman said: “It cannot be right that the mega-rich should be able to exploit the poorest people in the world. That is exactly what these vulture funds have been doing and it has to stop.”

Nick Dearden of Jubilee Debt Campaign, which has been leading the campaign against the vulture funds, said: “It’s completely wrong that the vultures should be able to scavenge money meant for some of the poorest countries in the world. MPs’ support is important in putting a stop to the profiteering.”

In the picture Stephen Ladyman MP and a vulture outside Parliament. The vulture is on the right!

3 comments:

  1. Drat! You got to that joke before me!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Richard just in case you thought I had added the last paragraph, that was the whole press release as Steve sent it to me.

    ReplyDelete
  3. It cannot be right that an MP takes 25 grand off a local developer, thousands in expenses from taxpayers and then takes a "consultancy" in an industry which months before they were a Minister.

    Anyhow vultures are an endangered species, I think we will always have MP's

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.