Disgruntled Nation

That’s madness! We need to be backing up the regime! Further sanctions will only do more damage to the counties economy and with ours the way it is we can’t afford to lose the €578m that we’ve invested there.

What’s that? You didn’t know we were propping up corrupt human rights abusing semi dictatorships?

‘Propping up’ might be going a bit too far, but it seems that the National Pensions Reserve Fund has invested 3% of said reserve funds €20bn into companies operating within Zimbabwe. The NPRF has rejected this claim saying that “its investments included shares in multinational companies with a presence in Zimbabwe, such as Barclays, BP and Nestlé. But the fund said it was wrong to treat its investment in such companies as having been entirely invested in Zimbabwe“ according to RTÉ. And that’s perfectly true. Companies like Barclays operate in many different countries and it would be silly to withdraw investment from them, as Advocacy is suggesting, just because they also have a branch in Zimbabwe. But they’re only 3 of the 14 companies mentioned and for some reason I don’t think Anglo American Corporation Zimbabwe ltd qualifies under the same criteria. The company is preparing to invest €250m into a platinum mine in the region, €6.5m of which has been provided by our good selves as reported in The Tribune. BAE Systems, a British weapons manufacturer received €14.5m from the NPRF. As well as providing fighter jet parts to Zimbabwe it has been investigated by the Serious Fraud Office in its home country and is indirectly engaged in the production of nuclear weapons for France and is the only manufacturer of nuclear submarines for the UK.

And those smart investments are surly to have attributed, in their own small but meaningful way, to the 10% drop in the value of the pensions fund at the end of the first quarter of this year. The government of Zimbabwe’s insistence that the rate of inflation in the country is at ’only’ 150,000% has been greeted as ’optimistic’ with many claiming the official figure could be 1,000,000%.

Surely a free and democratic government in Zimbabwe would have little use for fighter jet parts. They’d look for investment in stupid things like health care and agriculture, the types of companies we don’t have money in. So if we’re going to protect our investment we should back Russia in calling for a halt to sanctions and maybe even send in the Irish Defence Forces to help out. It’s our pension fund we’ll be defending!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.