Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Rory Stewart and Richard Fuller

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

[Rory Stewart]

Q Just as a quick follow-up, Sir Paul, you have used the phrase “public risk capital”; would you expand a little bit on what you are saying about the need for public involvement?

Sir Paul Collier: Yes. These environments are risky environments, in which there are not great amounts of money to be made by private enterprise. That is why so few firms go there. So one of the purposes of public money is to bear some of the risk. I believe we should be prepared to lose some public money in incentivising firms to go to places where there is a public interest. Parliament has not, and DFID has not, authorised CDC to go that step—yet. I very much hope that that will happen. In the negotiations for the latest International Development Association round—IDA 18, which is being signed this month—the World Bank’s aid arm is authorised to lose money in International Finance Corporation investments, to get firms to go to places where there is big public interest. We are on a journey, and scaling up CDC is part of that journey.

[Richard Fuller]

Q Just on the issue of low-tax environments and tax havens, and their use by CDC, I am not sure if you were all present for the earlier evidence session, in which a question was asked about that, but essentially the point was that in a number of the locations in which CDC operates they do not have the financial infrastructure or probity to encourage either CDC or other investors around that. Do you think that CDC makes effective and good use of tax havens in its investing, and do you have any concerns about that?

Sir Paul Collier: I should say that I was instrumental in the British G8 trying to clamp down on secrecy havens and get the compulsory register of beneficial ownership, so I had a lot of fight to push this agenda forward. The use of the overseas territories for registering companies has a triple function: sometimes it is a tax haven, which is bad; sometimes it is a secrecy haven for banking, which is worse; and sometimes it is a neutral administrative centre for a lot of third-party investments. If a company from the middle east wants to invest, along with a company from India and a company from Singapore, along with CDC, they try to find a neutral territory.