International Money Fiends

The International Monetary Fund devastated the developing world – and now it’s targeting eastern Europe.

It’s stripped millions of people of their livelihoods, but the global economic crisis has brought one institution back from the dead: the International Monetary Fund.

Two years ago, the IMF looked to be on its last legs. It had got to a stage where no-one wanted to borrow the Fund’s money anywhere. Many developing countries started accumulating reserves to avoid ever having to go to the IMF loan shark. Developed countries in trouble would go just about anywhere – China, Russia, Saudi Arabia – to avoid the IMF.

Then came the meltdown. Despite the fact that the IMF failed to see it coming – pretty damning for a body supposed to oversee global financial stability – bankrupt countries suddenly had no choice but to come begging.

In April last year, the G20 pumped the organisation with £330 billion worth of new funds. The radical Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano called the decision “black humour”, saying it would “rub salt in the wound" of countries hit by a crisis they did not create.

The IMF claims to have been reborn. It says it has mended its ways (without apologising for them) and will do things differently this time around.

Certainly there are discussions about changing its voting system, which currently assigns Belgium and the Netherlands more votes than China. And in the present economic crisis, the IMF has, in some cases, actually encouraged countries to spend. It now also expresses ‘concern’ about protecting the very poorest.

But in depression-hit eastern Europe the IMF is rapidly becoming as hated as it once was in Africa.

In the 1980s at the height of the Third World Debt crisis, the IMF lent huge amounts of money to developing countries, allowing them to pay off their loans to banks who had recklessly lent in the 1970s. The banks got bailed out, while the poor paid the price. Exactly the same thing is now happening in Eastern Europe.

Latvia is experiencing Europe’s worst recession. On the IMF’s assessment, by the end of this year Latvia will have experienced a worse crash than the US during the Great Depression. Unemployment stands at 23 per cent.

The fund has led a rescue package of 7.5 billion euros (£6.7 billion) – but the price is eye-watering austerity measures. Schools and hospitals are expected to close and the government has pledged to reduce maternity benefits and raise taxes. Wages have been slashed by up to 40 per cent.

In Hungary, the right-wing Fidesz party looks set to sweep to power in April after disenchantment with the government, which took an IMF loan in return for higher taxes and spending cuts. In Romania, the IMF is demanding spending cuts and labour reforms that could lead to 100,000 job losses.

In Ukraine, a full-blown political battle is being waged. Angry at prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s toeing of the IMF line, voters favoured her rival Viktor Yanukovych in February’s presidential election. However, Tymoshenko has refused to concede defeat, alleging electoral fraud.

Late last year, Ukraine’s parliament voted to raise the minimum wage. The IMF protested by suspending its funding. Today, parliament’s refusal to pass a budget for 2010 with sufficient spending cuts means the IMF funding is again on hold.

Clearly the IMF is as much about power as economics. This is nowhere seen more clearly than in Iceland. Icelandic politicians have fumed that the IMF has blocked aid, saying it is doing so in order to pressure Iceland into paying back the British and Dutch bailouts of imprudent investors – on the terms demanded by the creditors.

The IMF is repeating history. But so too are the people, with street protests in Riga, the Latvian capital, becoming increasingly militant and a small-scale renewal of anti-IMF activism in the west. It looks like the seeds of the next wave of resistance are already in place.

This article first appeared in Red Pepper.

Thanks to the Bretton Woods Project for some of the information it contains.

Copenhagen: the sound of silence

By Nick Dearden and Tim Jones

The problem the Danish government faces gets bigger by the hour. Clearly the government is desperate for the UN climate summit in Copenhagen to be seen as a success, regardless of whether the deal done is capable of slowing down climate change in a just way. But it is faced with an ever-swelling army of critics who believe this issue is too important for a stitched-up compromise, negotiated late at night between corporate lobbyists and rich-country governments in conference hotel rooms.

Faced with seemingly irreconcilable positions – between developed countries who won't change their economic model and poor countries who realise that accepting the crumbs from the table is little use when faced with environmental devastation – any facade of consensus has broken down. Looking increasingly desperate, the authorities are trying to clamp down on all criticism in the hope that that will make it go away. In fact it is making it even more vocal.

For months the Danish government has been preparing to silence the critics – even approving new police powers to clamp down on protest. Last month we wrote to express our concern that these powers could easily be used to prevent those without a voice at the summit expressing themselves. The Danish government responded that "the new [police powers] will in no way affect peaceful demonstrators".

The sight of 1,000 activists being held in freezing temperatures without basic rights for many hours clearly exposes the Danish authorities' argument. So do reports of pepper spray being used on protesters held in cages, the constant raids on meetings and sleeping quarters, the arrest of a civil society spokesperson on the eve of yesterday's demonstration and the many more stories of serious infringements of civil liberties.

Time and again, we have seen that those incarcerated in unacceptable conditions were actually peaceful protesters – or even bystanders, in some cases. A member of our own staff taking pictures of a demonstration inquired what law he was being challenged under and was told: "It doesn't matter, you have no rights, you must do what I say or you will be arrested." The purpose, it seems is not directed at the threat of vandalism or violence but at protest per se.

This reflects exactly what is happening inside the conference centre, where criticism or alternative voices have been ignored and are now being silenced. Developing countries have felt so marginalised by a process clearly under the control of rich countries that they staged a walk-out on Tuesday. The same day the Danish prime minister Rasmussen sought to impose an agreement from above, killing off the legitimate negotiations and the binding Kyoto agreements. Rich countries have been trying to wriggle out of their emission reduction commitments throughout Copenhagen, and developing countries are right to resist.

Today, many developing countries are leaving the centre again to join protesters outside. Also today, civil society organisations including Friends of the Earth, Avaaz and Tck Tck Tck have been thrown out of the conference. Incredibly, delegates and media have been told they will lose their accreditation if they talk to these banned NGOs. No credible justification has been given for this behaviour.

But the real reason is simple – civil society groups ensure that the interests of ordinary people and the planet are not trampled on; at least not in silence. They have few resources to offer in comparison with the power of the corporate lobbyists inside the summit, many of whom will make a fortune if the free market "solutions" to climate change that they are advocating are to go ahead. Together with developing governments and protesters on the streets, civil society organisations are standing up against such deals, and making clear that only a radical, just solution will get us out of this mess.

Attempts to stop the voices of the protesters do not only ride roughshod over Denmark's reputation for upholding civil liberties, they also threaten to foist an unjust and ineffective climate deal on the world. The lives and livelihoods of millions of people across the world are at stake. They have a right to be heard. Silencing them is a crime of unimaginable proportions.

This article first appeared on the Guardian website.

Developing Nations Unite Around Justice in Barcelona talks

by Nick Dearden and Tim Jones

The decision of African nations to walk-out of the Barcelona climate talks this week, and the support they received from other developing countries, proves that climate change is transforming global politics. The poorest countries in the world are refusing to sit by while their future right to development is negotiated away by vested interests in rich countries.

Developing countries have rediscovered a unity in recent months which is capable of shaking western complacency in a more fundamental way even than the collapse of WTO talks in Seattle 10 years ago. And their argument has an authority which will draw support from citizens right around the world – because at its core is a call for justice, summed up by the concept of ‘climate debt’.

It isn’t simply a matter of asking the rich world to pay for the devastation climate change is causing in the developing world. As a report recently launched by World Development Movement and Jubilee Debt Campaign points out, ‘climate debt’ questions a global free market system which has pushed many developing countries into high carbon pathways that they now need to find a way out of.

Through enormous debt burdens, through aid and lending and through trade rules, rich countries and their spokesmen in the IMF and World Bank have forced policies on developing countries which have created carbon addiction. These policies have led to more oil and coal being dug up, more trees being chopped down, more food being grown on massive farms to export to the West, more dependency on fossil fuels for electricity needs.

Indonesia is home to the world’s third largest area of tropical forest and faces a huge problem of deforestation – it accounts for 70% of the country’s carbon emissions. Indonesia’s timber trade boomed under the corrupt President Suharto, as he looked for ways of repaying the enormous loans flowing into the country from his western backers. Suharto liberalised investment regulations, allowing foreign companies to become key players in the destruction of forests and export of timber.

When the IMF waded into Indonesia’s financial crash in 1997, it infamously told the government to cut government spending (the very opposite of how our own governments have dealt with the financial crisis), forcing cuts in environmental protection which left forest resources vulnerable to private operators. It also told the government to remove restrictions on foreign investment in palm oil plantations, causing rampant deforestation and destruction of peat land.

Meanwhile, Nicaragua faced demands to privatise its electricity sector as a condition of receiving debt relief from the IMF and World Bank. Short-term this actually reduced Nicaragua’s carbon emissions – in the most regressive way possible – by increasing the average electricity bill by 100-400% and pricing the poor out of the market. But long-term it has increased the country’s fossil fuel addiction, because private companies are far less likely to put in the investment needed to create a renewable energy base.

Since the mid-1990s, the proportion of Nicaragua’s electricity coming from oil has increased from 55% to over 70%, while electricity from renewables has fallen. In contrast, Nicaragua’s neighbour Costa Rica has maintained a public, not-for-profit electricity system and the country gets 94% of its electricity from renewable sources.

Likewise, Ecuador has massively extended its oil production over the last 20 years, with the IMF seeing oil as a key way of Ecuador repaying its mountain of debt, itself based on loans irresponsibly lent to its military junta in the 1970s. This oil has done little for Ecuador – the IMF demanded 70% of oil revenues be earmarked for debt servicing, and no more than 10% for social spending. When current President Correa increased the proportion flowing into the social sector IMF loans were cancelled.

The examples go on, adding to the rich world’s ‘climate debt’, which we need to pay to enable developing countries to rid themselves of poverty, but in a less carbon-intensive way then we did. Our new report estimates that the UK – accountable for 6% of historical emissions – needs to make massive cuts in emissions. By rights, it is we who have used up our allowance – we are already carbon bankrupt. To make up for this fact we believe that the UK owes £660billion – which could be repaid as just under £17billion a year through to 2050. A huge amount – but on the other hand it is only 1% of our national income, which has been built up by carbon intensive industry, and less than the Lloyds group was given in its bail-out package. A small price to pay for a habitable planet.

But the rich world fails to understand that climate change will not be solved by throwing a few loans the way of the starving and destitute. Indeed their solution is an avalanche of new loans to developing countries who are already repaying debts at a rate of 5 times what they receive in aid every year. And to oversee these loans will stand the World Bank – an institution at the very heart of carbon-fuelled growth and Third World debt. As Central American activist Ricardo Navarro commented recently “I would rather that the UK government bought flowers for every household in the UK than spend this money on a World Bank coal fund."

Of course the concept of climate debt scares many – the same vested interests referred to earlier. Arch-climate-change-denier and former Thatcher government advisor Lord Muncton even described it as a blueprint for “world communist government”. Doubtless many saw Roosevelt’s New Deal or the creation of the welfare state in the same way. Certainly it implies fundamental changes in the global economy, radical redistribution of the world’s resources.

But the alternative is not ‘merely’ the continuation of gross inequality and shameful levels of poverty in a world rich in resources. It is the ability of all of us to inhabit our planet.

This article first appeared on UN-NGLS.

Radicals return to the UN

After 30 years of marginalisation, commentators from across the world are hailing the United Nations conference on the economic crisis as a new opportunity for progressive change. While the June summit’s outcomes were not as radical as many would have liked, the battles that took place between rich and poor countries hold out some hope for the enfranchisement of the majority world – the global South.

Southern governments demanded the conference as the economic crisis started to grip the world last November. Despite repeated offers by UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon to host talks on the crisis, rich countries have preferred their own company. They have, however, used the relatively unheard of G20, rather than the G8, to add a sprinkling of legitimacy to decisions – and, more importantly, because the financial reserves of countries such as China and Saudi Arabia are essential to stimulating the global economy.

The fightback on behalf of the UN was led by Latin American countries. After months of attempts by rich countries to downplay and delegitimise the summit, it finally happened on 26 June.

Central to the process was the president of the UN general assembly, Reverend Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann. D’Escoto, a leftist priest from Nicaragua, enraged rich countries by offering a radical paper for nations to debate that declared ‘globalisation without effective global or regional institutions is leading the world into chaos’.

That this former Sandinista foreign minister should encourage 192 countries to air their views on matters of global importance caused the British – and other western delegations – a touch of indigestion. A suitable programme to discredit d’Escoto was launched. Rich country diplomats told Reuters that the UN summit was a ‘joke’, a ‘tragedy’ and a ‘waste of time,’ accusing d’Escoto of hijacking the conference in order to put capitalism on trial and threatening to boycott it.

D’Escoto replied that rich countries could not control the conference and that ‘it must speak to the hundreds of millions across the globe who have no other forum in which they can express their unique and often divergent perspectives.’ He warned countries not to turn the UN summit into an ‘international charade’, adding, ‘I earnestly believe that this is an opportunity the world cannot afford not to take advantage of.’

The UN versus the G8
Western hostility could be clearly seen in the level of representation they sent. Gordon Brown, Barack Obama and other western leaders shunned the summit, but found the time to turn up to the annual photoshoot known as the G8, which met only two weeks later in L’Aquila, Italy.

The G8 discussed aid, climate change and energy security, keeping announcements firmly within the western comfort zone, trying to pre-empt a UN agreement on climate change in December and refusing to subject itself to criticism from upstart countries.

But then this is exactly the point of the G8 and always has been. The G6, forerunner to the G8, first met in Rambouillet in 1975, amid another economic crisis and with the aim of excluding the majority of the world from decision-making. In 1974 the troublesome UN general assembly had passed a far-reaching proposal for economic reform, the ‘new international economic order’, that outraged the west.

Had the world listened to the calls for change in the 1970s – for corporate regulation, fair prices for raw materials and equitable trade rules – we would not have embarked upon the three decades of free market fundamentalism that have brought the economy and environment to breaking point.

Structural reforms
The UN was a thorn in the side of western leaders for decades from the 1950s, hence their strong desire not to go back to those days. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that proposals to the UN conference on the economic crisis looked so different to the business-as-usual agenda set out by the G8 in Italy, and indeed the G20 at the London summit in April.

Central to that G20 agreement was the resuscitation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The institution has been promised £450 billion (though much of this is still to be seen), very little of which is for the poorest countries.

In addition, of course, the IMF is a deeply flawed institution, which seems to have learned little in the 10 years since its policy impositions turned a disaster into a crisis in south-east Asia. A recent report by the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), ‘Bail-out or blow-out?’, shows that, of 10 recent IMF loans to low-income countries, all required spending cuts, five mandated wage bill freezes or cuts, five forced governments to pass on food or fuel price rises to citizens and all include some sort of structural reforms such as privatisation, increases in indirect taxation or trade liberalisation.

The rest of the money promised by the G20 is for ‘export finance’ – helping companies to invest overseas. In the UK this means the infamous export credit guarantee department, which has used taxpayers’ money to hold up the British arms industry for decades.

At the UN, meanwhile, former World Bank chief economist turned globalisation critic Joseph Stiglitz put forward a range of structural reforms on behalf of President d’Escoto. He was clear that ‘the international trade and financial system needs to be profoundly reformed.’ The Stiglitz commission recommended a powerful global economic co-ordination council at the UN to bring the World Bank and IMF to heel, an end to the practice of forcing economic policies on developing countries, an international debt work-out process that would allow for far greater and fairer debt cancellation and a new reserve currency to replace the dollar.

Agreeing with many developing countries, Stiglitz was said that ‘without a truly inclusive response, recognising the importance of all countries in the reform process, global economic stability cannot be restored.’

Moving away from the self-selected club
The final result was – predictably, given the intransigence of rich countries – less radical. The conference agreed few concrete measures, short of setting up a working group to examine many of the issues raised – though this itself is an important step forward. The conference also laid the blame for the economic crisis firmly at the feet of the developed world, conceded rights to developing countries in terms of economic sovereignty and acknowledged that many countries were unhappy with the dollar as global reserve currency.

Sadly this was too much for the US, which promptly started distancing itself from a document it had just agreed to.

The real significance comes not in the formal agreement, however, but in the fact that the conference took place in the teeth of such strong opposition. As Stiglitz said: ‘The UN showed that decision-making needn’t be restricted to a self-selected club, lacking political legitimacy, and largely dominated by those who had considerable responsibility for the crisis in the first place.’

Unlike the G20 or G8, negotiations at the UN were transparent and open to civil society groups across the world. Moreover, developing countries have shown themselves able, for the first time in many years, to express a common vision of a more equitable world. The G77 plus China group (actually a group of 130 developing countries) has shown a remarkable level of unity over the economic crisis and climate change.

Forum for alternatives
The weakness of the UN has led some social movements to sharply criticise its usefulness in bringing about radical change. It is no wonder some regard the UN as a tool for imperialism given its recent history and championing of initiatives such as the Global Compact – a weak and unenforceable code on companies that turns the likes of Coca-Cola, Nestlé and BP into ‘good corporate citizens’. But the crisis summit shows, at least, that the UN can be a forum for an alternative economic and political agenda.

The UN is something that can and should be fought over – not simply conceded by ordinary people and developing world states to the powerful. There are still UN institutions that consistently produce radical analyses of the world economy. If developing countries can find the unity to fight for it, real change is achievable. For example, China’s criticism of dollar hegemony makes massive changes in the global financial system possible, ending the insane system whereby China and other developing counties continue to fuel US over-consumption by effectively lending it trillions of dollars at low rates of interest.

While western leaders may scoff at D’Escoto’s words, they can surely provide a rallying cry for hundreds of millions of people across the world: ‘The anti-values of greed, individualism and exclusion should be replaced by solidarity, common good and inclusion. The objective of our economic and social activity should not be the limitless, endless, mindless accumulation of wealth in a profit-centred economy but rather a people-centred economy that guarantees human needs, human rights, and human security, as well as conserves life on earth. These should be universal values that underpin our ethical and moral responsibility.’

As we head towards the Copenhagen climate summit, as the economic crisis further devastates Southern economies, the UN might again become a battleground on which we can win important victories.

This article first appeared in Red Pepper.

Time to ditch the dollar

Emerging states such as China, Russia, and Brazil have finally had enough of the rule of the dollar. When Alistair Darling meets his counterparts at the G20 finance ministers' meeting this weekend, he should join them and right this "exorbitant privilege" that allows US overconsumption to be subsidised by the rest of the world.

The centrality of the dollar was built into the postwar Bretton Woods economic system, but in the early 1970s Europeans became concerned that the US, by printing money to fund the Vietnam war, was endangering their own dollar holdings, which were losing value compared to gold. In 1971 a French battleship arrived in New York full of dollars to exchange for gold, with the British following suit.

Four days later, President Nixon took radical action. The "Nixon Shock" was that from then on the dollar would not be linked to the value of gold. Rather the dollar was the new gold – and it alone was used to facilitate trade, measure international prices and allow countries to build up protection for their economies.

Following the Asian financial crisis of 1997, dollars become increasingly important to developing economies. Burned by their experience of taking International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans and the devastating impact of the economic conditions that institution imposed on them, they started buying dollars (in the form of US Treasury bonds) as an insurance policy against ever having to go to the IMF again.

In effect this meant that poor countries were, and still are, lending money to the US at very low rates of interest. Rather than ploughing money into their own economies, they are fuelling consumption in the richest country on earth. In 2007 total dollar reserves held by developing countries amounted to $3.7tn (£2.3tn).

Radical developing world leaders such as Hugo Chávez have long bemoaned the impact of "dollar imperialism", especially the pricing of oil in dollars, which means that countries can't buy oil without propping up the US economy. But he has now been joined by China, fearful of the collapse in value of its own massive reserves estimated at nearly $2tn, and Nobel-laureate Joseph Stiglitz, who recently chaired a UN commission that recommended the replacement of the dollar as global reserve.

Last week Stiglitz told Americans that it was not merely that "there is something a little unseemly about poor countries lending the United States trillions of dollars, now at an interest rate of close to zero" but it also damaged the US because "we are exporting T[reasury]-bills rather than automobiles, and exporting T-bills doesn't create jobs."

Reformers are not asking for the dollar to be replaced by an alternative national currency. That would simply tie the global reserve to the domestic politics of a different country. But they do believe the IMF's own "currency" known as special drawing rights (SDRs) could show the way to a better solution.

SDRs give countries a level of theoretical reserves that can be traded for hard currency on payment of interest. Last week the IMF took the unusual step of issuing $250bn worth of SDRs at the behest of the G20 as a way of helping ease the global economic crisis.

But for SDRs to play the role of global reserve currency would require that they be controlled by a very different institution from the current IMF. As things stand, SDR issues are rare and when they are made they reflect the voting share of countries in the IMF. Hence of last week's $250bn, less than $100bn will go to developing countries and a measly $19bn to low income countries. The IMF ignored civil society pressure that the distribution should be fairer, that interest rates for use of SDRs by low income countries be eliminated and that transfer of SDRs from rich to poor countries be encouraged.

But this doesn't mean the IMF's action has nothing useful to offer. A new institution – a global reserve bank – could be established that would regularly issue an international currency like the SDR to those who need it most and at times (such as recession) when it is needed most.

The global reserve currency would no longer be tied to the volatile exchange rate of a national economy, making it more stable, and poor countries would not have to spend precious funds insuring their economies against collapse. And, if tied to a new global framework, such a mechanism could ensure that debtor and creditor countries share responsibility for returning the economy to equilibrium by discouraging large deficits and excessive surpluses.

These ideas are not a million miles from those of John Maynard Keynes in 1944; ideas that were squashed by the US when it created the IMF. With the age of the dollar nearing its end, we must ensure that its replacement helps create a fairer and more stable world.

This article was first published on the Guardian Comment is Free.

Iceland proves that the debtor has rights too

Recent events in Iceland may have completed that country's transformation from free market, credit-fuelled billionaire playground to champion underdog. The Icelandic Parliament’s offer to the UK and Dutch governments earlier this week that it will pay back its debts but only at a level it can afford, could provide an invaluable model for how indebted nations can start putting the needs of their people ahead of the desires of the global financial markets.

Iceland has become synonymous with the financial crisis after nearly a decade of drinking neo-liberal kool aid. Around 2000 Iceland went on a deregulation and privatisation binge, totally reforming its financial sector, dropping bank reserve requirements, raising interest rates sharply, sucking in foreign capital and encouraging massive borrowing. It lived the dream being promoted by most European capitals at the time. So many millionaires flew into tiny Rejavik that a local politician demanded limitations on planes coming into the country.

Such a highly indebted financial system was, unsurprisingly, an early victim of the credit crunch, even though Iceland was not invested in sub-prime loans. Their situation was certainly not helped by Gordon Brown – proponent of the very policies Iceland had slavishly followed – who designated the country a terrorist state last October in order to seize Iceland’s banking assets in the UK. His attempt to derive popularity amongst investors at home neatly side-stepped the failure of UK authorities to adequately regulate UK investment.

The enormous anger that followed in Iceland toppled the government, and since then has radically reduced support in Iceland for the country’s membership of the EU. Most recently ordinary citizens have pushed members of the ruling coalition and opposition parties into opposing the enormous repayments being demanded by the British and Dutch governments.

That is the background to the decision earlier in the week of the Icelandic Parliament – the Althing –that it would repay its debts, but only at a rate it could afford. That is defined as spending no more than 4% growth in GDP to repay UK debts (and 2% for Dutch debts). If the economy doesn’t grow (because of inappropriate conditions forced on the country by creditors for example) Iceland pays nothing.

This decision, if implemented, is historical. Michael Hudson, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, has said that it is the first agreement “since the 1920s to subordinate foreign debt to the country’s ability to pay”. Hudson is referring to the 1920s debate that raged over capping Germany’s First World War reparations repayments. Keynes argued at the time that insisting on debt repayments beyond a level which also allowed the country to grow would inevitably mean forcing Germany to sell its assets or alternatively to borrow more money. He predicted the subsequent anger and discontent caused in Germany, which led straight into World War II.

But the situation which Iceland is trying to deal with is one which has faced scores of developing countries for decades – countries with less responsibility for the current mess than Iceland. Many countries still have to pay unreasonable levels of debt by selling off assets, skewing their economy towards unsustainable export trade and foregoing their right to development.

Iceland is correct to assert that states in debt have rights that trump the rights of creditors to bleed their economies dry. When companies and municipalities become insolvent, they are protected by work-out laws – but no such work-out mechanism exists when it comes to countries.

If limiting Iceland’s debt repayments is right, the same must apply, to an even greater extent, to poorer countries. Lebanon spends over 50% of government expenditure in servicing debts, Uruguay 32% and the Philippines 31%. These states top a much longer list of developing countries who understand from experience the injustice of indebtedness better than any European government.

Iceland has led the way in standing up for the rights of debtors. It may be followed by a range of indebted Eastern European countries who are also currently having their economic policies dictated to them by the International Monetary Fund.

This article was first published in the Morning Star.

Vultures who scavenge off the living

The financial sector may be low on fans in the current climate, but even at a party of bank managers, vulture funds would probably find themselves standing alone by the canapes.

Vulture funds - otherwise known as distressed debt funds - feed off the very poorest. Usually based in tax havens, these funds buy up developing country debts for a fraction of their real value and then sue the country in question for full immediate repayment, making massive profits in the process.

Unsurprisingly, companies suing developing countries often find themselves popular targets for Western campaigners.

In 2003, owner of Iceland supermarkets The Big Food Group was suing Guyana for over £12 million but dropped the case after an outcry from debt campaigners. In December 2002, Nestle dropped a similar claim of $6m (£3.6m) against Ethiopia.

But vultures are less well-known than Iceland or Nestle. As a result, so are the cases that they fight and - all too often - win. Even more shocking is the fact that well over half of these cases are fought in US or British courts.

Vultures were seen in action in 1997 when a company called Donegal, a vulture registered in the British Virgin Islands, sued Zambia in the High Court for $55m (£33m) on a debt it had bought for $3m (£1.8m).

This debt was generated as far back as 1979, when Zambia was lent $15m (£8.9m) by Romania in order to buy Romanian tractors and other farming machinery. Twenty years later, Zambia was unable to repay its debts and became eligible for debt relief. The Zambian and Romanian governments were negotiating the cancellation of the tractor debt as part of this process.

Enter Donegal International, a fund set up purely to purchase this debt and run by US businessman Michael Sheehan - otherwise known as "Goldfinger."

Donegal was able to purchase the debt from Romania for $3.3m (£1.9m) and then sue Zambia in British courts for the full $55m - eventually winning $15m (£8.9m) in 2007.

In essence, some of the recent debt relief that Zambia had been given by countries like Britain was snatched back by a vulture fund.

Zambia is far from alone. The International Monetary Fund claims that at least 54 companies have taken legal action against 12 of the world's poorest countries, for claims amounting to $1.5 billion (£900m).

Vulture action is ongoing against Ethiopia, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and others.

A company called FG Hemisphere has been awarded $100 million (£59.8m) against the Democratic Republic of Congo and is now seeking the money in jurisdictions including Hong Kong, South Africa and the US.

The company recently won a court order in the US for fines of up to $80,000 (£47,860) a week against the war-torn DRC after it failed to disclose all of its assets across the world.

And even this isn't the whole picture. It doesn't include, for instance, "less poor" countries such as Argentina, which is facing a case brought by a vulture fund called NML.

NML bought Argentinian bonds that were defaulted on during the country's 2001 financial meltdown. It is currently using British courts to try to recover payment against assets that Argentina might have in Britain.

So it was particularly good news when the British government announced its intention last week to prevent these funds - in effect - from using British courts. The government's proposal is to apply the same terms to vulture-fund cases as are applied to all other creditors of countries deemed eligible for debt relief. So when cases come up before British courts, a large proportion of debt relief would be deducted from the total figure of the debt they seek to reclaim and vulture activity would become pointless.

Even better, in the US, Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Waters is leading the charge to ensure that vultures cannot use US courts to "profiteer," which is defined as making more than 6 per cent interest on any debt that is bought.

So this could be the end of the road for the vultures. It will certainly put a deep hole in their profits. But the case hasn't been won yet.

The government's consultation is open until October 8, and heavy lobbying can be expected from some in the financial sector. Moreover, the government's proposal only covers very poor countries which are eligible for debt relief.

The legislation will not come a moment too soon. As more and more countries fall into debt and the economic crisis worsens, vulture funds might seem like a recession-proof career.

"Vulture" is actually a somewhat favourable term for companies that scavenge not off the dead but the living. Closing them down is one small step towards combating the secrecy and irresponsibility of the financial system as a whole.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star.