2010-06-03 13:06:19

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.







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