Vulture funds prey on poor countries

[eridani]

Can anyone think of any reason that all involved shouldn't just be put up against a wall and shot?

http://readersupportednews.com/off-site-news-section/81-economy/1383-stop-feeding-the-vultures

I get the idea that Eric Hermann doesn’t want to talk to me. When I came to his office suite, his hedge fund’s name plaque had been unbolted from the building’s wall, the suite number removed and all the employees locked in.

I’m not surprised. Hermann is a vulture, not the carrion-eating type, but the kind that prey on the financially wounded. “Vulture” is a hedge fund industry term for the financiers who buy up the right to collect old loans of the world’s poorest nations, and then use every trick in the book — from lawsuits to bribery to hiring Henry Kissinger’s lobby firm — to muscle destitute countries into turning over their meager foreign aid funds.

Vultures, whether of the feathered or speculator species, don’t like to talk to reporters.

On February 25, the day after BBC Television’s Newsnight ran my report from in front of Hermann’s locked office door, Britain’s Parliament voted to bar vulture funds from using Britain’s courts to grab the assets of poor nations.

And what about the United States? Why are our own politicians cowering behind legislative locked doors?

What we can do and why we should do it requires, first, a little more info on how vultures operate.

In Hermann’s case, his hedge fund bought, for next to nothing, the right to collect several million dollars owed by Liberia. (They grabbed the debt from a unit of what is now J.P. Morgan Chase; banks like Morgan Stanley like to hand off their dirty work.) In February 2002, Hermann’s fund then sued Liberia for the long-forgotten loan, for compounded interest and fees. Hermann filed suit the very week Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, was surrounded by warlords, with neither electricity nor water, and the government was controlled by an escaped convict from the United States, Charles Taylor, who is now imprisoned at The Hague.

To no one’s surprise, neither Taylor nor representatives of Liberia showed up in the New York court. Liberia thereby lost by default, and was ordered to pay Hermann and his partners all the millions they sought.

Fast forward to 2007 and peace in Liberia. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is elected Africa’s first female president and donor nations, including the United States and Britain, agree to pay off Liberia’s old debts. By now, almost all that debt is held by vulture funds, but they all, including Hermann, agree to accept three cents on the dollar of their claims which, while seeming low, produced a very nice profit for these “investors.”

But when it came time to actually turn over the loan papers, Hermann and his partner, Michael Straus, admitted that they had passed off a hunk of their holdings to mysterious British Virgin Island funds called “Hamsah” and “Wall.”