Dehai News Mailing List Archive: ThisIsAfrica.me: Stealing Africa: The case for wiping out all debt

on October 6, 2016 —

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Watch it: Stealing Africa .... Why Poverty?

Rüschlikon is a village in Switzerland with a very low tax rate and very wealthy residents. But it receives more tax revenue than it can use. This is largely thanks to one resident - Ivan Glasenberg, CEO of Glencore, whose copper mines in Zambia are not generating a large bounty tax revenue for the Zambians. Zambia has the 3rd largest copper reserves in the world, but 60% of the population live on less than $1 a day and 80% are unemployed. Based on original research into public documents, the film describes the tax system employed by multinational companies in Africa.

Director Christoffer Guldbrandsen
Producer Henrik Veileborg
Produced by Guldbrandsen Film
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The amount of wealth flowing out of Africa is ten times the amount the continent receives in foreign assistance. This is the only argument African countries need to make when advocating for debt forgiveness. Through tax dodges like “transfer pricing”, big multinationals pay more taxes in the West than they do in Africa while carting away its resources. How long shall Africa allow this to continue?

Tax dodge: Africa isn't getting its due from multinationals (Photo: 401(K) 2012 via https://www.flickr.com/photos/68751915_at_N05/)

Tax dodge: Africa isn't getting its due from multinationals (Photo: 401(K) 2012 via https://www.flickr.com/photos/68751915@N05/)

When it comes to African countries selling their birthright for a song, Zambia is the undisputed King. The country has the third largest copper reserves in the world and yet 80% of Zambians are unemployed and 60% of the population lives on less than a dollar a day – the World Bank metric for extreme poverty.

Compare this to one of the men responsible for Zambia’s inability to reap the appropriate benefits from its natural wealth: Ivan Glasenberg. Glasenberg is the the CEO of the Anglo–Swiss multinational commodity trading and mining company Glencore plc which, by all accounts, is making a killing in Zambia.

Birthright: A copper mine in Zambia. The country has has the third largest copper reserves in the world. (Photo: photosmith2011 via https://www.flickr.com/photos/63744740@N07/)

Glasenberg’s net worth in 2016 is estimated to be upwards of 3.8 billion. (That’s richer than Donald Trump!). This obscene opulence is unconscionable when Zambia losses 3 billion dollars from the kind of corporate tax dodges Glencore is involved in every year.

In 2013, the documentary series Why Poverty studied how Glasenberg had managed to take from Zambia and give to himself. The findings in the documentary are a damning indictment of Africa’s capitulation to foreign multinationals at the expense of its citizens.

ThisIsAfrica.me: Stealing Africa: The case for wiping out all debt

Stealing Africa: The case for wiping out all debt

By This Is Africa

on October 6, 2016 —