Driving the Ugandan roads two months ago, Allan (who wortks with Ugandan organisation NAPE) came up with a wonderful idea to promote tourism to Uganda and add a special exiting and adventurous feature to it. “What”, he told me, “if we would hire an amphibious car and do the Pothole Experience. We load the car with tourists and drive at selected Ugandan roads along the potholes in the road and disappear in the biggest ones at one side and come up at the other side. As an encore we could ultimately experience a water filled pothole, dive into it with the car and see if we manage to come out the water at the other side. If not, we at least had a wonderful time in the previous potholes!”
Pension funds have a lot of influence because of their enormous assets. Both ENDS therefore wants pension funds such as the Dutch ABP to withdraw their investments from the fossil industry and to invest sustainably instead.
After months of lobbying of a group of NGOs, including Both ENDS, the United States Congress has opposed weakening of the investment criteria, the so-called ‘safeguards’ of the World Bank. The Congress sent a letter to the US Treasury, stating that the Banks’ social and environmental criteria for investments should not be weakened and the Treasury should oppose this. This is a great success for civil society organisations from around the world - including Both ENDS – which have been working for years to maintain and even improve the current investment criteria of the World Bank.
The European Commission is about to take important decisions about Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs). These agreements are designed to protect corporations that invest in a foreign (often developing) country. These international agreements are binding, but often undermine the social and environmental regulations that developing countries want to implement. On march 3, the European Parliament will vote on reforming these policies.
Hundreds of millions of euros from Ukraine found their way in recent years through Dutch letterbox companies, many of them registered at the Amsterdam Zuidas. The purpose: invisible and beneficial laundering of funds that lined the pockets of a handful of oligarchs in Ukraine by means of corruption and illegal practices - including the son of President Yanukovych. Fortunately, the Dutch government has now put a stop to this practice. Last week, Parliament decided to investigate suspicious Ukrainian assets and freeze them: a small triumph for Both ENDS and their partners!