Investors buying into claims against governments are winning huge payouts.

[hay rick]

Wall Street investors can enrich themselves by impoverishing governments and the environment.

When a foreign mining company sued Greenland in 2022, the government’s lead lawyer thought he was prepared. Paw Fruerlund had handled similar cases before, and he believed the law and facts were on his side.

When he arrived at one of the first hearings, however, Fruerlund stared across the table at 12 corporate lawyers from two firms representing his opponent, an Australian company called Greenland Minerals. There were so many, they spilled across two rows of seating, Fruerlund recalled. He fretted that his own three-person team, now greatly outmatched, might strain the budget of Greenland, a semi-autonomous nation of mostly Indigenous Inuit people.

...

Litigation finance is a multi-billion dollar sector devoted to funding lawsuits and corporate legal departments. In an arbitration case like Greenland Minerals’, these “third-party funders” generally agree to take a 20 to 50 percent cut of any award or settlement in exchange for assuming legal costs. If the company loses the case, the funder gets nothing. But the best funders report win or settlement rates of 75 percent or higher across the various forms of litigation they finance.

Companies like Burford have been betting on cases like Greenland Minerals’, where foreign investors sue governments before ad-hoc panels of arbitrators, since the 2000s. The arbitrations are part of a system known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, which is built into thousands of international investment agreements and contracts that give foreign businesses formidable rights.

Link here: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08122024/investors-buying-claims-against-developing-nation-governments/

[Stargazer99]

1. I am so damn tired of corps and business taking us to the cleaners aren't you?

[Ferryboat]

2. It was buried in the Trans Pacific Partnership that

TSF didn't sign in first days of pervious administration. The ONLY good thing he did.
No one was paying attention at the time.

[hay rick]

3. Chalk one up to sloth. nt

[Turbineguy]

4. It's the way to make money

do or participate in doing something harmful.

The nice thing about having money is the harm you can do. And then get away with it. Poor people can do harm and may have good reasons, but they don't get away with it.

[Mike 03]

6. I don't understand the voracious greed

Everybody wants enough money to be comfortable, but why is there this tier of millionaires/billionaires who have so much more than they could ever spend in a lifetime but who continue to pursue limitless wealth, even late into their lives when more thoughtful people would be appreciating the time they have left and living meaningfully. What good will Elon's $400 billion do him when our planet is burning up? He can live underground with several hundred thousand cans of tuna, I guess. What kind of life is that?

[Mike 03]

5. Big Lawfare is as terrifying as the health insurers.

This will become the new way of shutting people up, because nobody wants to be sued and few people have the financial resources to fight back.

There's a pretty good book about this trend in law firms: "Servants of the Damned" by David Enrich.

If anyone has seen the movie "Michael Clayton", that film gives a taste of how ruthless, vicious and immoral these firms are.