Big firms’ $1trillion hidden handouts
Cash could triple healthcare spending
GOVERNMENTS have been accused of fattening big firms’ profits through a $1trillion-a-year scandal.
Campaigners claim countries around the world – including the UK – are “diverting” funds that could be used to benefit ordinary people into boosting companies’ coffers instead.
Examples range from slashing corporation tax and dishing out subsidies, to “allowing them to engage in tax dodging”.
The report comes ahead of a rally planned next month to mark ten years since the collapse of Wall Street banking giant Lehman Brothers, a defining moment of the financial crisis.
Today’s report has been put together by a group of organisations, led by Health Poverty Action.
It argues governments are failing in their responsibility to provide basic needs for their citizens, while allowing corporate excess.
The combined $1trillion – or £790billion – is what the report says is “the amount of resources that governments are diverting to big companies rather than people each year”.
Around $500bn (£392bn) of that is corporate tax avoidance, the report claims. It says $1tr could triple the money spent on healthcare for half the world’s population, and fund the NHS six times over.
Report author Natalie Sharples, head of policy and campaigns at the Health Poverty Action said: “Ten years since the financial crisis, the UK and other governments seem to think the spiralling inequality they have created is acceptable. It isn’t. “It’s time for a massive redistribution of wealth, both nationally and globally, away from big corporates back towards people and our overstretched yet vital public services.”
It came as separate research out yesterday from industry experts Janus Henderson found firms around the world paid a record £390bn in dividends to shareholders between April and June this year.
Dividends boost City firms as well as pension funds on which millions of ordinary workers rely.