STWR - Share The World's Resources

Multinational companies operating in the world's poorest countries are "dodging" around £270bn a year in tax, anti-poverty campaigners claimed today.

By not paying the taxes, rich businesses are depriving developing countries of much needed revenue, according to a report by Christian Aid.

Andrew Pendleton, a senior policy advisor for the charity, said the scale of the lost revenue "beggars belief".

The report names no names but says leading accountancy firms, banks and business conglomerates with close links to the UK were implicated.

The study says the businesses are secreting money in offshore banks, trusts and companies, creating tax havens away from Britain.

It argues that the shortfall means the developed world will never achieve its stated aim of reducing world poverty. The report coincides with the UN's review of its Millennium Development Goals (MDG), which is taking place in New York.

By hailing the failure of this summer's G8 summit as a success, Bob Geldof has betrayed the poor of Africa

 

Two months have not elapsed since the G8 summit, and already almost everything has turned to ashes. Even the crustiest sceptics have been shocked by the speed with which its promises have been broken.

There's been a lot of hand-wringing going on among economists and politicians, and a lot of fuming at the gas pump by consumers over the soaring price of oil over the last two years.

Increasingly, concern is being expressed by treasury officials and economists about the negative impact soaring oil prices and related gas prices could have on the overall economy. Politicians-especially Republicans-- are also fretting, since the thousands of extra dollars consumers are now spending on electricity, home heating and gasoline have, for all but the wealthiest taxpayers, more than cancelled out any minimal benefits they saw from the president's tax cuts.

What's wrong with this picture?

The focus of all this anger and angst is oil prices. As a result, everyone is looking at culprits in the wrong place, blaming wasteful energy use, OPEC production quotas, monopolistic oil companies and/or conniving oil traders.

In fact the real culprit behind these higher oil prices is the Bush Administration, which, thanks to its massive deficits and tax give-aways to the rich and corporations, to its war spending, and to its failure to combat unprecedented and ever-larger trade deficits, has been causing the dollar to plunge in value.

The G8 proposals on debt and aid represent serious progress, but the devil may still peer out of the details during its implementation.

It is essential we all scrutinise them closely, as Mark Curtis does (Comment, August 23). He is right to point out the obfuscation in the OECD's method for counting debt and aid into an overall development assistance number, mixing both the ongoing aid flows with the bookkeeping of debt relief, as if they were equal parts.

Donors get too much credit for some debt transactions. They should only be credited for the part of the debt deals which free up money for fighting poverty. The rules must be changed and donors charged with providing a transparent account of their delivery, just as the same transparency is demanded of recipients' use of those funds.

But Curtis is incorrect in his portrayal of the G8 debt deal, which met three important criteria on paper - additionality, so there is more money to fight poverty; policy clarity, so getting rid of the cycle of lending and forgiving; and no new onerous conditionality. True, there are details in the deal which have always been there and live in the nature of deal-making. For example, that the additional money donors have agreed to contribute to finance the debt deal will be shared among all poor countries and not just those countries that are part of the deal.

Releasing its annual trade and development report, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) also said that the strong growth in developing countries' economies in the past three years meant many countries could still meet the UN's millennium development goals aimed at halving extreme poverty by 2015.

The report said it was wrong to blame surging Chinese exports for the big trade imbalances around the world and to call for a big revaluation of the yuan as a way to reduce them.

Supachai Panitchpakdi, the former World Trade Organisation chief and Unctad's new secretary general, said China represented only 8% or so of the total global current account surplus in 2004 whereas Germany and Japan made up nearer 30%, or $268bn (£146bn).

"It should not be forgotten that much of the counterpart to the United States' external deficit is to be found in the surpluses of other developed countries. Asian countries are using their surpluses to import more but Europe and Japan are not doing much," he said.

Three fifth of Bangladesh is now under water. About 50 million people are thrown from bad to worse conditions. Not everybody is suffering; there is a small section of people who feel joy with the rising water. They find their business (from alu-patal to fund stealing to huge (re)construction potential to flood control consultancy) booming.

Facing another flood, another experience of human disaster where should we look at? People in general are taught and eventually used to take flood sufferings-loss-tragedy as a curse of fate. The ruling local-global lords are happy to describe flooding as a natural disaster. I find the flood disaster as a close associate of the 'development' festival drama. In other words, the flooding is closely linked to grabbing of water land and filling them with shopping plazas and multistoried housing, and to big faulty projects of irrigation and flood control. All these contributed to bringing a country of free flow water to a water-logged country. This is a big story full with lies, hypocrisy, cheating, intellectual fraud and all-out plunder. To make it short I would like to discuss in brief on the water projects and the role of the World Bank, along with the ADB, who enjoy the status of "friend philosopher and guide" of local-foreign beneficiaries of human suffering in a country like Bangladesh.

A senior United Nations official has accused President George Bush of "doing damage to Africa" by cutting funding for condoms, a move which may jeopardise the successful fight against HIV/Aids in Uganda.

Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary general's special envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa, said US cuts in funding for condoms and an emphasis on promoting abstinence had contributed to a shortage of condoms in Uganda, one of the few African countries which has succeeded in reducing its infection rate.

"There is no doubt in my mind that the condom crisis in Uganda is being driven by [US policies]," Mr Lewis said yesterday. "To impose a dogma-driven policy that is fundamentally flawed is doing damage to Africa."

The condom shortage has developed because both the Ugandan government and the US, which is the main donor for HIV/Aids prevention, have allowed supplies to dwindle, according to an American pressure group, the Centre for Health and Gender Equity (Change).

In 2003, President Bush declared he would spend $15bn on his emergency plan for Aids relief, but receiving aid under the programme has moral strings attached.

Hydrogen-powered cars are being touted as the pollution-free alternative of the future. But, reveals Lucy Siegle, they'll come with a dirty secret...

At school, my class showed genuine brilliance at sidetracking teachers on to red herrings. It was always preferable to spend an hour listening to a random anecdote - even if it was about cricket or growing dahlias - than to get bogged down in a boring set text.

Still, this miseducation left me with the ability to spot a red herring at a hundred paces. And the idea that the hydrogen economy will be the world's environmental saviour smells very fishy to me.

On the surface it all adds up. Hydrogen fuel cells use platinum to create electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen into water, theoretically providing a pollution-free alternative to oil. Not surprisingly, George Bush seems punch drunk on hydrogen, announcing a billion dollar development programme so that 'The first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen and [be] pollution-free.'