Up to $41 billion in World Bank climate finance unaccounted for, Oxfam finds
Hat tip to Exposing the Darkness. More evidence that TPTB don’t care about the climate, but use the excuse of climate to acquire huge money pools.
| MERYL NASS OCT 27 |
It seems the World Bank’s climate remediation fund is actually a slush fund (but for whom?) derived from taxpayer monies meant to help the poor, and a considerable amount of its funds have simply disappeared. You can’t lose $41 Billion dollars. There are checks, bank transfers or other records that Oxfam may not have had access to, but surely the nations contributing to the Bank (and the US always gets to choose the Word Bank’s chief executive) can follow the money trail. Were they to choose to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_the_World_Bank_Group
The president of the World Bank Group is the head of World Bank Group. The president is responsible for chairing the meetings of the boards of directors and for overall management of the World Bank Group.
The nominee is subject to confirmation by the Board of Executive Directors, to serve for a five-year, renewable term. Traditionally, the World Bank Group president has always been an American citizen nominated by the United States, the Bank’s largest shareholder, and the IMF‘s managing director has been a European citizen.[1] While most World Bank Group presidents have had economic experience, some have not.[2]
The fourteenth and current World Bank Group president is Ajay Banga, who was selected on May 3 and began his term on June 2, 2023. Ajay has been a US citizen since 2007.
The disppearing funds wandered off starting prior to Ajay’s term.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/about/leadership/governors
All powers of the Bank are vested in the Boards of Governors, the Bank’s senior decision-making body according to the Articles of Agreement. However, the Boards of Governors has delegated all powers to the Executive Directors except those mentioned in the Articles of Agreement.
Published: 17th October 2024
Up to $41 billion in World Bank climate finance —nearly 40 percent of all climate funds disbursed by the Bank over the past seven years— is unaccounted for due to poor record-keeping practices, reveals a new Oxfam report published today ahead of the World Bank and IMF Annual Meetings in Washington D.C.
An Oxfam audit of the World Bank’s 2017-2023 climate finance portfolio found that between $24 billion and $41 billion in climate finance went unaccounted for between the time projects were approved and when they closed.
There is no clear public record showing where this money went or how it was used, which makes any assessment of its impacts impossible. It also remains unclear whether these funds were even spent on climate-related initiatives intended to help low- and middle-income countries protect people from the impacts of the climate crisis and invest in clean energy.
“The Bank is quick to brag about its climate finance billions —but these numbers are based on what it plans to spend, not on what it actually spends once a project gets rolling,” said Kate Donald, Head of Oxfam International’s Washington D.C. Office. “This is like asking your doctor to assess your diet only by looking at your grocery list, without ever checking what actually ends up in your fridge.”
The Bank is the largest multilateral provider of climate finance, accounting for 52 percent of the total flow from all multilateral development banks combined.
The issue of climate finance will take center stage at this year’s COP in Azerbaijan, where countries are set to negotiate a new global climate finance goal, the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG). Climate activists are demanding the Global North provide at least $5 trillion a year in public finance to the Global South “as a down payment towards their climate debt” to the countries, people and communities of the Global South who are the least responsible for climate breakdown but are the most affected. Oxfam warns that the lack of traceable spending could undermine trust in global climate finance efforts at this critical juncture.
“Climate finance is scarce, and yes, we know it’s hard to deliver. But not tracking how or where the money actually gets spent? That’s not just some bureaucratic oversight —it’s a fundamental breach of trust that risks derailing the progress we need to make at COP this year. The Bank needs to act like our future depends on tackling the climate crisis, because it does,” said Donald.
Oxfam’s investigation revealed that obtaining even basic information on how the World Bank is using climate finance was painstaking and difficult.
“We had to sift through layers of complex and incomplete reports, and even then, the data was full of gaps and inconsistencies. The fact that this information is so hard to access and understand is alarming —it shouldn’t take a team of professional researchers to figure out how billions of dollars meant for climate action are being spent. This should be transparent and accessible to everyone, most importantly communities who are meant to benefit from climate finance,” said Donald.