Families to file complaint with IFC over rubber plantations
Some of the hundreds of families losing land and community forest to Vietnamese-owned rubber plantations in Cambodia’s northeast will this week file a complaint with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) over the investment it has made in the plantations’ parent company. Eang Vuthy, executive director of Equitable Cambodia, one of several NGOs working with the affected families, said the complaint would be filed with the IFC’s compliance adviser ombudsman today or tomorrow. The IFC’s interests in Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) was first revealed by the U.K. environmental watchdog group Global Witness in May, at the end of a months-long investigation concluding that investments by both the IFC and Deutsche Bank were helping to finance illegal logging and land grabbing by the firm’s many rubber plantations here. According the Global Witness, the IFC at the time had $15 million invested in a Vietnamese fund holding nearly 5 percent equity in HAGL. … Mr. Vuthy said the complaint accuses the IFC, the private sector lending arm of the World Bank Group, of breaking its own policies meant to guarantee that its investments are used ethically. “Based on IFC policy, they have to monitor their policies, and the company [HAGL] has to comply with these policies,” he said. … But rather than seeing the IFC simply divest as Deutsche Bank did, the families want it to use its financial stake in HAGL to pressure the plantations into returning their farms and to stop forest clearing and land grabbing. …
Zsombor Peter
http://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/families-to-file-complaint-with-ifc-over-rubber-plantations-51765/
