‘Tax rich to save the poor’

The Covid pandemic has created a new billionaire every 30 hours and now one million people could fall into extreme poverty at the same pace, Oxfam has warned as the Davos summit returns.

The international charity said it was time to tax the very rich to support the less fortunate, as the global elite gathered at the Swiss mountain haven for the World Economic Forum after a two-year Covidinduced absence.

Oxfam said it expected 263 million people to sink into extreme poverty this year, at a rate of one million every 33 hours, as soaring inflation has added a cost-of-living crisis on top of Covid. By comparison, 573 people became billionaires during the pandemic, or one every 30 hours.

“Billionaires are arriving in Davos to celebrate an incredible surge in their fortunes,” Oxfam executive director Gabriela Bucher said.

“The pandemic and now the steep increases in food and energy prices have, simply put, been a bonanza for them.

“Meanwhile, decades of progress on extreme poverty are now in reverse and millions of people are facing impossible rises in the cost of simply staying alive,” she said.

Oxfam called for a one-off “solidarity tax” on billionaires’ pandemic windfall to support people facing soaring prices as well as fund a “fair and sustainable recovery” from Covid.