Strip-Mined Pacific Island Nation Of Nauru In Receivership - The Age

[hatrack]

"The Pacific nation of Nauru, the world's smallest republic, is likely to go bankrupt this week after decades of exploitation and mismanagement. Yesterday it confirmed that receivers had taken control of its assets in Australia, including hotels and a shopping centre in Sydney and Melbourne, as it faces default to a major US financier.

The bankruptcy would cap a sad tale that has seen the island, home to 12,500 people, slip from having the world's highest per capita income in the early 1970s. The once idyllic island halfway between New Zealand and Hawaii, dubbed "Pleasant Island" by its first white visitor in 1798, has also been turned into a barren wasteland by strip-mining of its phosphate resources.

"Nauru was once a tropical paradise, a rainforest hung with fruits and flowers, vines and orchids," Finance Minister Kinza Clodumar said in the early 1990s. "Now, thanks to human avarice, greed and short-sightedness, our island is mostly a wasteland."

EDIT

Royalties Trust which, in its heyday, had swank properties around the world. But symptomatic of the trust's problems, many of its hotels across the Pacific are now boarded up and worthless. The money was also used to fly in processed Western food, causing rates of diabetes, heart disease and hypertension to reach world-beating levels and life-expectancy to plummet. Numerous hare-brained schemes and failed investments are to blame to Nauru's drop in fortunes. At one point money was ploughed into a failed London musical called Leonardo. Nauru turned itself into a no-questions-asked banker for the Russian mafia in the 1990s, a venture which lasted until last June. Until recently it had around 400 off-shore banks, all registered to one government mail box."

EDIT

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/18/1082226623418.html

[the Kelly Gang]

1. Capitalism at it's finest..the richest corporation in the world ,

GE Finance takes over an entire nation..lets here it for Globalistaion :puke:

[hatrack]

2. Check out This American Life for a fascinating story about Nauru

Go to their website:

http://www.thislife.org/

Then click the "Archives" button for 2003. It's the story entitled "The Middle Of Nowhere".