We revisit the saga of 'Vulture Funds' with a look at Tony Allen-Mills Times Online piece:
Earlier this year, in a little-noticed, out-of-court settlement, the Brazzaville government paid off its“vulture” creditors, thereby ending almost a decade of legal wrangling that stretched from Bermuda and the Virgin Islands via Paris, New York and Hong Kong to London’s High Court.
It was a startling surrender for a country that has spent much of the past 10 years dodging its creditors, ignoring court orders and pleading to join the debt-relief programme run by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Why give in to the vultures just as world opinion had clearly turned against the hedge funds?
They were tracing the country's stolen revenues:
Armed with court-approved powers to subpoena witnesses and with search warrants, the Elliott team[Elliott Associates, a $10 billion (£5 billion) hedge fund] began a journey into the murky depths of the international oil trade. It would subsequently emerge in court that the Brazzaville government had established a network of sham companies (known in French as faux nez, or “false noses”) and bogus executives (“straw men”) in the hope of concealing their oil transactions.
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