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Not So Fun Fact: Theresa May Leads the West in Stealing Africa's Wealth
May's government facilitates Western plunder of Africa's wealth. In 2012, developing countries including those in Africa, lost $700bn through 'trade mis-invoicing'. That's five times the aid receipts developing countries received that year. Trade mis-invoicing takes money out of these countries and hoards it in tax havens.
And where are these havens? Well, May's government allows the largest network of tax havens through its overseas territories, facilitating a lot of this capital flight. Half of the 240,000 tax-dodging shell companies revealed in the Panama Papers were registered in the British Virgin Islands alone, for example.
Add such capital flight to repayments on debt and Western profit extraction, and the picture is staggering. Net resource outflows from developing countries end up totalling about $3tn per year, which is 24 times the amount they receive in aid.
Origin
On August 25th, 2016, Instagram[2] user nanaakooo posted a photograph of the sculpture (shown below).
On August 26th, Instagram users @ma_kimodo_shi[4] and @j_s_rock[3] posted photographs of the sculpture (shown below).
The sculpture was created by the Japanese special effects company Link Factory.[6] Pictures of it subsequently became an urban legend on the Spanish-speaking web and was associated with "a phone number that could be added to WhatsApp."
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