The African continent has 1 billion 370 million people, among them, and 490 million of them live in dire poverty. Why? Africa is the richest continent, with the poorest population in the world. There is an elite class of corrupt African billionaires who have allowed transnational corporations to plunder the wealth of the African continent. That is something that has not started recently but has been occurring for several hundreds of years. The African continent exports annually minerals, agricultural products, petroleum, gold, diamonds, carbon and platinum. Permit me, our dear readers of this column, to present to you the following information which was extracted from CTXT (contento y acción):

Companies steal wealth
The $68 billion that has been stolen from Africa using illicit international capital flows accounts for approximately 6.1% of the entire GDP of the continent. Multinational companies are stealing $48.2 billion through misleading invoicing alone, according to figures obtained by Global Financial Integrity. Previous investigations by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa came up with similar figures: multinational companies stole close to $40 billion a year from African countries using false commercial invoicing in the decade before 2010. Another tremendous problem is buying of concessions by companies at false bargain prices, often linked to cases of corruption and tax havens. In 2013, the Africa Progress Panel and Global Witness reviewed five major mining rights sales operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose deals included companies registered in the British Virgin Islands. They found that the companies paid at least $1.36 billion below actual market value (nearly double what DR Congo spends each year on healthcare and education combined).

Those who control tax havens enable Africa’s wealth to be stolen
Wealth is being stolen from the people of Africa through a process that allows a small minority of Africans to get rich by letting the wealth flow out of Africa. In this sense, according to a recent report on the wealth of Africa, there are currently around 165,000 individuals with high purchasing power in Africa, who together have accumulated possessions worth 860,000 million dollars. In 2016, there were 24 billionaires in Africa with a combined wealth of $80 billion. Where do these people mostly keep their wealth? In secret places registered in tax havens with low taxation, such as the Channel Islands, Switzerland or the United Kingdom. Gabriel Zucman, a professor at the London School of Economics, estimated in 2014 that Africa’s wealthy held as much as $500 billion in tax havens, equivalent to 30% of all Africa’s financial wealth. Since this wealth is untaxed, that means African elites have stolen $15 billion from their own countries, according to Zucman’s conservative estimate.”

I only hope that we do not have this type of culture in Belize. At the same time, I ask myself, who owns 174 miles of Belize’s sea front?

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February 19, 2022
Finca Solana
Corozal Town