Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill (First sitting)

Kate Osamor Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Do any members of the Committee wish to make declarations of interest? No? Good. We will now hear oral evidence from the Minister and from the chair and chief executive of the CDC. Before calling the first member to ask a question, I would like to remind all members that questions should be limited to matters within the scope of the Bill, and we must stick to the timings in the programme motion agreed by the Committee. We have until 10.30 am for this session. Could the witnesses introduce themselves for the record?

Diana Noble: I am Diana Noble and I am the Chief Executive of CDC.

Graham Wrigley: I am Graham Wrigley and I am the chairman of CDC.

Rory Stewart: I am Rory Stewart and I am the Minister of State, Department for International Development.

David Kennedy: I am David Kennedy and I am the director general for economic development at DFID.

[Kate Osamor (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)]

Good morning. CDC’s operational policy published in March 2014 on the payment of taxes and the use of offshore financial centres dictates that CDC would invest through a jurisdiction that is not successfully participating in the Global Forum only in exceptional cases. What would be the exceptional cases in which it would use these jurisdictions?

Diana Noble: Let me first say that CDC’s use of OFCs has nothing to do with secrecy or reducing tax. We take pride in the payment of corporation tax by our portfolio companies in the countries where we invest— it is one of our development indicators. We use OFCs for two important reasons. One is for legal certainty; the other is to pool capital in neutral places. Let me explain both of those. CDC’s mission is to invest and grow businesses in some of the poorest companies in the world. Unfortunately, many of those places do not have legal systems that allow us to invest with certainty that, if there is a dispute, we will be able to get our money back. Of course, one of our big areas of responsibility is to look after UK taxpayers’ money: that is part of our mandate. So unfortunately, for some places where we invest we have to go through an offshore structure.

The second point is that we have a very important mission to pool capital from other investors to come in alongside us into difficult countries. This is an enormously important role. If we look at CDC’s investments from 2004 until now, we have supported fund of funds that total $30 billion in Africa and south Asia, of which CDC has only provided $5 billion—so that is $25 billion from other investors. Those investors come from lots of different jurisdictions themselves, so the capital does have to be pooled somewhere. Those investors, who are already cautious about the countries in which the investments are being made, have a lower risk tolerance than CDC does, for legal certainty; so they insist on a safe jurisdiction. We, however, do play our role, because we insist that that pooling is done in the best, or the most compliant, of the offshore centres in the OECD register.

Do we think that the situation is ideal? We don’t. We look forward to the day when every country where we invest has a safe legal regulatory system, where we can invest directly in every single country; but that is not the case today. What we have done, though, is encourage an important project that we have been working with DFID on, to examine the possibility of an onshore centre in Africa. That work has led to the Governments of Kenya and Rwanda taking this very seriously. It would be a very long-term project, but we are very keen that it gets progressed over time.

[Kate Osamor]

Q How many offshore jurisdictions do you currently use?

Diana Noble: It is a short list. We can provide absolute clarity about exactly how many, subsequent to this Committee. On the list are certainly Mauritius, which is well accepted as a place for pooling capital, particularly for Africa and south Asia; Guernsey; and Cayman Islands.

Rory Stewart: I have the list: at the moment, it is Cayman Islands, Guernsey, Jersey, Luxembourg and Mauritius.

[The Chair]

Kate Osamor—are you happy?

[Kate Osamor]

Yes.

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

Q I apologise, Mr Streeter, for being slightly late. Graham, can I ask you a little about the potential for the CDC to attract investment from other investors? Diana was just talking about the fund of funds drawing funds in, but at the top level of the CDC are there opportunities to get sovereign wealth or other enlightened investors, perhaps high net worth individuals, to put their money alongside the increasing capital of the CDC?

Graham Wrigley: That is an interesting question. The other day someone asked us whether it would be possible to turn the CDC into an ISA or a PEP. Looking at how other DFIs are funded, the IFC has created a vehicle whereby people have invested alongside the IFC; the FMO is owned partly by some banks as well as—

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Thank you.

[Kate Osamor]

Q Thank you, panel. This question is for all panel members. Do you feel that CDC is sufficiently focused on poverty eradication in line with DFID’s outcomes?

Sir Paul Collier: In a word, yes. I have been working on Africa for 40 years and it has been frustrating, because Africa is still poor. This year, per capita GDP in Africa is falling. We have a quiet crisis of trying to rekindle African growth. There is no secret about what rekindling growth and getting out of poverty means: it means raising the productivity of ordinary people and we know how to do that. Raising the productivity of ordinary people is what proper firms do. They perform a miracle of productivity every day by bringing ordinary people together at scale and specialisation, and making them dramatically more productive than they would be as isolated individuals. Africa is desperately short of proper firms, and the public interest in getting proper firms to go to Africa is enormous. That is the underlying rationale for CDC, and that is what it is doing.

CDC went through a very poor patch with this fund of funds idea, which was a crazy idea. It now has really expert management. What CDC is doing, and what DFID is doing to support it, is absolutely standard. This is what International Development Association money, which is the collective, concessional money given by the world’s rich countries to the World Bank, is being devoted to. The transfer to the International Finance Corporation—[Interruption.] I will shut up.

[The Chair]

Thank you, Sir Paul. Let us hear from Oxfam and War on Want.

Gideon Rabinowitz: Thank you for having us on this panel; we appreciate it. Oxfam recognises the importance of investing in economic development and the private sector as a fundamental part of our development efforts. Economic development needs to be a core part of what DFID and the British Government do with regard to aid. Our concern is to make sure that any aid funds that are invested in those causes really support the right types of jobs, growth and investment that reach the very poorest. The international community agreed at the UN that all development effort should be focused on reaching those left behind. That needs to be the prism through which we see this. Given that prism, we recognise that the reforms agreed in 2011 to CDC were a really important step forward. They focus CDC more on the poorest countries and strengthen its focus on looking at development impact and its investment standards, but we also think that that is the start of a journey that CDC needs to go on in the coming years to ensure that it is focused not only on DFID’s mission of development and poverty reduction, but on the international development community’s focus on leaving no one behind.

We want to note a number of areas where we think CDC can do more. The first point relates to its focus on the least developed countries. Only 12% of CDC’s investments currently go to the least developed countries—the most economically and socially vulnerable countries as measured by a comprehensive index by the UN. We have some questions about whether the sector focus is right. Agriculture, where the majority of the world’s poor make their livelihoods, accounts for only 5% of CDC’s investments at present. A decade and a half ago that figure was one third. There needs to be a re-engagement in sectors such as agriculture.