Speculators must stop exploiting poor nations, says Vatican official
(June 03, 2010) The Vatican supports international efforts to prevent speculative
investors from exploiting heavily indebted poor countries, said a top Vatican official.
Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Holy See’s Permanent Representative to United Nations
Organizations in Geneva, said so-called vulture funds are taking advantage of current
international debt-relief measures. A vulture fund is any company that buys up defaulted
debts very cheaply, and then tries to make a profit by attempting to recoup the original
amount of the debt, often by suing the impoverished country in U.S. or European courts,
or by seizing a country's assets or applying political pressure, he said. "Vulture-fund
activities complicate sovereign debt restructuring by causing inequitable burden-sharing
among creditors and undermine trade and investment relations of the countries that
they target," he said in an address on June 2nd to the Human Rights Council
in Geneva. Countries need to accept a sense of "co-responsibility for the causes
and solutions relative to international debt," and they must rebuild trust between
creditors and debtors so that ethical solutions to the burden of debt may be found,
he said. The Archbishop added that the debt of the developing countries must be placed
in a broader context of economic, political, human rights and technological relations
concerns as well as of international collaboration in pursuing the objectives of the
common good. This interdependence calls for a new and more comprehensive concept of
solidarity which respects the equal dignity of all peoples. Thus mutual trust is an
indispensable value which must be constantly renewed, concluded Archbishop Tomasi.