David Martin's EU Tribune

Just prior to the 2010 general election, the UK Labour Government passed a ground-breaking law to clip the wings of predatory Vulture Funds. The UK law enforces internationally agreed relief for the most impoverished countries. Unfortunately, due to a technicality, this law did not apply to Jresey.

Vulture capitalists run Vulture Funds to make profit out of debt. Vulture capitalists make a killing and feed off of other people’s misery. The UK brought in a law to stop Vulture Funds using British courts to prey on the hardship of developing countries. However this law doesn’t yet apply to Jersey.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo should be one of Africa’s richest countries however it has suffered from decades of ravaging civil war. It has a mineral wealth estimated to be around $24 trillion (£15tn). There are huge deposits of cobalt, diamonds, gold, copper, oil and 80% of the world’s supplies of coltan ore – a valuable mineral used in computers and mobile phones.

Yet 100 women a week are still dying in childbirth and 16,000 children under the age of five die every year. One in three children in the DRC will never get anything more than primary education.
One of the reasons the country has been unable to recover is that it is being pursued by international debt speculators, known as Vulture Capitalists through offshore tax havens such as Jersey, for debts that were run up during 30 years of war and civil war.

Vulture funds operate by buying up a country’s debt when it is in a state of chaos. When the country has stabilised, Vulture Funds return to demand millions of dollars in interest repayments and fees on the original debt.

Right now, the Vulture Fund FG Hemisphere is using Jersey’s courts to claim $100m from the Democratic Republic of Congo. They bought this debt for just $3.3m.  Jersey’s new Chief Minister shouldn’t turn a blind eye to this; he should extend the UK’s anti-Vulture Funds law to Jersey.

The European Union should also follow the UK Labour Government’s example and introduce such a law to force creditors to take part in debt write-downs and stop the Vultures scavenging.

You can seethem,the Vultures are beginning to circle Greece and Ireland.

I am receiving an increasing number of enquiries from constituents in Scotland who are concerned about participating in the coming census and population survey on 27 March 2011.

The Scottish Government has gone ahead with awarding an £18.5 million contract, to carry out the Scottish Census, to a wholly- owned subsidiary, CACI (UK), of a US based company accused of torturing prisoners in notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Abu Ghraib shot to prominence in the media in the autumn of 2003 when pictures revealing abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoner were flashed around the globe. There was immediate and universal condemnation of these actions.

CACI (UK)’s parent company CACI International was one of two private US security companies employed at Abu Ghraib to carry out interrogation for the US military.

It has emerged that although one third of CACI staff at Abu Ghraib had never received any military interrogation training,prisoners allege that CACI interrogators used dogs to terrify prisoners and encouraged the military to abuse prisoners.

All the money that CACI (UK) makes from carrying out the Scottish Census belongs to CACI International.

The shameful thing is that the Scottish SNP Government knew about this back in 2008 before they awarded the contract.

Writing in The Herald on 26 July 2008 Neil Mackay said:

‘Granting CACI (UK) – a subsidiary of the firm accused of torture – the £18.5 million contract has not only badly wounded the SNP government’s claims of being more ethical than Labour and putting human rights at the top of its agenda, but has also led to fears personal data on millions of Scots collected by the company might be sifted by the US government…’

http://www.heraldscotland.com/scottish-government-hires-firm-accused-of-torture-in-iraq-1.829007

So the concern is not only that the Scottish Government is employing a company accused of human rights abuses but there is also a danger that all the information gathered by CACI in the Scottish Census could be sifted by the CIA or US Federal Authorities under the Patriot Act.

We have already raised concern in the European Parliament that the SWIFT agreement on security with the US Government allowed their federal agencies access to private bank details of customers in Scotland and elsewhere in the European Union (EU). That agreement had to be modified after the action by the European Parliament to protect constituents’ private data.

It is even more shocking that the Scottish Government has gone along with its deal with a US company when EU Procurement rules give the Scottish Government discretion to exclude a contractor that ‘…has been guilty of grave professional misconduct proven by any means which the contracting authorities can demonstrate.’

Many of my constituents are now saying that given all these details they do not know if they can comply with the demand to fill out the forthcoming census.

I will be asking the European Commission to look into this matter.