Now UK supermarkets get slice of £12bn foreign aid
MINISTERS last night faced fresh demands to get a grip on the foreign aid budget following revelations about cash being lavished on supermarket chains or sent to emerging superpowers.
The Department for International Development also faced claims that consultants paid to spend part of the £12billion aid budget have netted tens of millions in shares and bonus payments.
On another day of aid farce, it emerged that millions of pounds is still being handed to India and China despite their rapidly growing economies.
One aid project claimed to support female parliamentarians in India. Another grant, worth £40,000, was handed to China to improve its copyright laws.
A handout of £102,762 went on ‘sharing UK best practice to support a public private partnership approach to financing the building of hospitals’ in Zhejiang, China.
Another £121,453 was spent on promoting ‘sustainable urbanisation’ in China, which is the world’s second biggest economy.
The Daily Mail has repeatedly highlighted how money is being dispatched abroad at a time when social care at home is in crisis with council tax rises in the pipeline to tackle the funding gap.
It also emerged yesterday that Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Tesco have been given taxpayer-funded grants to help their overseas suppliers.
The cash went on training and improving conditions for their Third World farmers and factory workers. Sainsbury’s led a £161,106 taxpayer-funded project in South Africa called Top of the Class, in which 170 workers were given ‘life skills’ training and some were brought to the UK.
MPs said the aid budget was subsidising big firms which should have been funding the schemes themselves. ‘A lot of people are telling me they can’t get care for their elderly parents yet billions of pounds are going to projects like this. It is out of control,’ said Tory backbencher Peter Bone.
‘These are big companies, making millions in profits. They don’t need the Government to hand out money to improve conditions. There’s a huge PR benefit for the companies and it doesn’t need Dfid.
‘It’s extraordinary that ordinary taxpayers are subsidising big companies in this way.’
News of the latest splurges came amid revelations that the bosses of a consultancy firm paid to distribute hundreds of millions in foreign aid have been awarded windfalls of up to £11.4million apiece.
The four executives at Londonbased Adam Smith International netted as much as £43million in share payouts and bonuses in the four years to 2016, the Sunday Times reported.
Peter Young, William Morrison, Amitabh Shrivastava and Andrew Kuhn picked up the share payouts in two reorganisations of the company structure in 2012 and 2015, company accounts show.
A spokesman for Adam Smith International said the four shareholders accepted a lower return than they would have received on the open market. He added: ‘Profits made by the company, some of which were used to finance the change in ownership, are small in comparison to the value of the results it has achieved.’
A spokesman for Dfid said: ‘It is categorically untrue to say that Dfid gives money for the benefit of UK retailers.
‘Dfid works in partnership with UK companies rightly helping to improve working conditions in their supply chains in farms and factories in the developing world.’
Sainsbury’s said: ‘The aim of the projects was to improve the lives of workers, farmers and their families through education.’