Dutch farmers want Zimbabwe to pay them compensation. White farmers were forced off their land during from 2000 to 2002 when the land grabbing started in all earnest.
Radio Netherlands reported on Wednesday that the farmers took their case to the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a Washington-based court which operates under the aegis of the World Bank.
Earlier this year, Zimbabwe finance minister Tendai Biti promised payment but has not held his promise, despite a letter from the Dutch foreign minister in August asking him to honour his word.
The ICSID already ruled in favour of the Dutch in 2009 and ordered Zimbabwe to pay up €8.8m in compensation, to be increased by 10% for each year since the illegal anti-white “reforms”.
According to the report, the group is now entitled to a sum of more than €23m and the Dutch government has been pressuring Zimbabwe over the past two years to fulfil its international obligations. A special envoy has been appointed to negotiate with Zimbabwean officials.
“We wanted to take action earlier, but decided to wait for Biti’s proposal,” the group’s chairperson Lion Benjamins was quoted as saying. “But now we’re sick of waiting, so we have decided to take steps to show Zimbabwe we’re serious.”
The group lobbying European parliamentarians in an attempt to ensure the EU refuses to lift its sanctions on Zimbabwe until the compensation is paid. They are also lobbying the British government to release frozen assets of the Robert Mugabe regime in order to foot the land grab bill.
Reuters) – The French are bleaker about their country’s future than at any time since 2005, a new poll showed on Saturday, with 68 percent saying they are “rather” or “very” pessimistic, the highest level ever in the initial months of a new presidency.
The poll’s findings jibed with a survey released last weekend which found that Socialist President Francois Hollande’s approval rating had slipped to 54 percent, continuing a steady decline since he took office in May.
The level of pessimism fell just short of an all-time high of 70 percent registered in August 2005, when the poll was created near the end of Jacques Chirac’s government.
Hollande’s government has been reeling from unemployment at a 13-year high and a rash of job cuts in recent weeks at top employers like carmaker Peugeot and retailer Carrefour . The government launched a plan this week to create 150,000 state-sponsored jobs for youth.
Only 34 percent of those surveyed were confident in the government’s ability to battle unemployment, and just 20 percent expect the government to be able to improve their buying power.
“It’s the first time that anxiety is so high at the beginning of a presidential mandate,” said polling firm Ifop, which conducted the survey for Dimanche Ouest France newspaper, in a statement accompanying the findings.
Pessimism stood at just 34 percent at the equivalent point in Chirac’s presidency in 2002 and 50 percent in Nicolas Sarkozy’s in 2007, the firm said.
The government’s efforts to spur consumption have been complicated by its EU deficit-cutting commitments, which mean hitting a 3 percent deficit target next year. That will force it to find some 30 billion euros ($37.8 billion) in deficit cuts next year, half of which it has said would come from spending.
The poll found that the pessimism extended even to 58 percent of Socialist party supporters.
Nearly 60 percent lacked confidence in the government’s ability to strengthen law and order, which has emerged as a concern in the wake of riots last month in the city of Amiens.
Those surveyed were asked: “In thinking about the future, for you and your children, would you say that you are very optimistic, rather optimistic, rather pessimistic or very pessimistic,” along with queries about their confidence in the government’s ability to make progress on various issues.
The poll was based on the views of 1,004 people aged 18 and over, interviewed Aug. 30 and 31.
(Reuters) – Greek leaders clinched a long-stalled deal on reforms and austerity measures needed to secure a bailout and avoid a messy default, government sources said, hours before the country’s financial backers were to meet in Brussels on Thursday.
Athens’ partners in the European Union and the International Monetary Fund have been exasperated by a lack of agreement on the sacrifices they demanded in return for a 130 billion euro ($172 billion) bailout, with time running out for Greece before a major March 20 bond redemption.
Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos set off for Brussels without a complete deal after all-night talks with leaders of the three Greek coalition parties and chief EU and IMF inspectors left one sensitive issue – pension cuts – unresolved.
But following further negotiation on Thursday, two government sources said an overall agreement had been reached.
“A few minutes ago, I got a call from the Prime Minister of Greece saying that an agreement had been reached and has been endorsed by the major parties,” European Central Bank President Mario Draghi told a news conference in Frankfurt in the first official confirmation.
The euro and European stocks strengthened on news of the breakthrough, which raised prospects of averting a chaotic hard default by the euro zone’s most indebted country within weeks, that could send tremors around the global economy.
The risk premium investors charge for holding Italian and Spanish bonds rather than safe-haven German Bunds fell back.
Euro zone officials say the full package must be agreed with Greece and approved by the EU, IMF and European Central Bank by February 15 so legal paperwork can be completed in time to avoid a chaotic default that may threaten the global economic recovery.
“The financial survival of the country in the coming years depends on the new program … It is a time of responsibility for everyone,” Venizelos said.
Greece’s two major labor unions called a 48-hour strike for Friday and Saturday against the reforms that the party chiefs managed to agree on.
“The painful measures that create misery for the youth, the unemployed and pensioners do not leave us much room,” secretary general of the ADEDY union, Ilias Iliopoulos, told Reuters.
“We won’t accept them. There will be a social uprising.”
Venizelos should now be able to present to fellow euro zone finance ministers a fully-fledged new bailout plan, including a commitment for 3.3 billion euros in budget cuts this year, when they meet at 1700 GMT.
Before then, all eyes will be on what the ECB is willing to do to help Greece at its monthly policy meeting.
WRITTEN COMMITMENT SOUGHT
After the overnight talks, a senior government official said the party chiefs had agreed on how to make about 90 percent of the promised savings, leaving a relatively small hole in the calculations.
Asked how the differences over pension cuts had been resolved, another government official told Reuters: “”There will be cuts in other areas of public spending and we will see how we will minimize reductions in pensions.”
International lenders are demanding that the party leaders commit themselves in writing to implement the program of pay and pension cuts, structural and administrative reforms.
The leaders have been loath to accept the lenders’ tough conditions, which are certain to be unpopular with voters. They face parliamentary elections possibly as early as April.
“In these difficult hours we have to look after the ordinary people, the pensioners,” conservative New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras said after the political leaders’ meeting.
“I haven’t got the right to not negotiate hard and I don’t care what other people think about that. We have to make sure that people will suffer less.”
Newspaper editorials criticized the harshness of the austerity measures demanded by Greece’s lenders, but said there was no other option but to give in and agree.
“The memorandum seems, and in fact is, heavy and unbearable for the majority of the Greek people but unfortunately it is the only choice so that the country is not led over the cliff,” financial daily Imerisia said.
Greece has been falling deeper into recession since it was rescued by a first bailout deal in May 2010, and latest unemployment data showed the country’s jobless rate rose to a new record of 20.9 percent in November.
Industrial output fell 11.3 percent in December, in further proof of the deep economic malaise.
ALMOST THERE
Prospects for a bailout deal had brightened when the finance ministers’ chairman Jean-Claude Juncker called the Brussels meeting – which IMF managing director Christine Lagarde will attend – to examine the bailout plan.
On offer from the EU and IMF is a package involving the new rescue funds and a bond swap with private creditors to ease the nation’s large debt burden.
Athens is also urging the ECB to forego profits on its Greek bond holdings in what could raise 12 billion euros or more. The bank’s 23-member Governing Council met on Thursday but Draghi declined to say how the Greek bonds held by the ECB and national central banks would be handled.
For the bailout, Athens must accept conditions requiring big cuts in many Greeks’ living standards. The smallest member of the coalition, the far-right LAOS party, was particularly uncomfortable with the measures.
Panos Beglitis, spokesman for PASOK which is in the coalition along with LAOS and the conservative New Democracy party, said the leaders had agreed to cut the minimum wage by 22 percent as part of efforts to make the economy more competitive. Plans to scrap holiday bonuses paid to private sector workers had been dropped.
Two sources said the government would promise spending cuts and tax rises worth 13 billion euros from 2012 to 2015, almost double the seven billion originally pledged.
Other elements of the deal have been gradually slotting into place, including the bond swap with private creditors to ease Greece’s debt burden by reducing the value of government bonds held by banks and insurers.
Private bondholders are expected to take real losses of about 70 percent on their holdings as part of the swap, under which they receive new, longer-dated Greek bonds to try to reduce Greece’s debt burden by about 100 billion euros.
Talks on the swap have dragged on for weeks, complicated by the position of hedge funds and demands that public creditors also chip in. Officials and bankers say the deal cannot be finalized until the rest of the rescue package is nailed down.
($1 = 0.7545 euros)
(Additional reporting by Renee Maltezou, Lefteris Papadimas and Karolina Tagaris in Athens and Paul Carrel in Frankfurt; Writing by David Stamp and Deepa Babington; editing by Elizabeth Piper)
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