Month: March 2018

“Dona Edir, Dona Edir” — the call is heard frequently in the narrow lanes of Canaa, a slum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.

It is for Edir Dariux Teixeira, who is well known among the residents, having spent more than a third of her life trying to improve infrastructure and basic services in the ramshackle settlement.

At the heart of that fight are legal property titles to the residents’ homes — or, more accurately, the lack of them.

“Without these documents we have no rights,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, sitting close to a fan to alleviate the near-40C (104°F) heat funneling from her asbestos roof.

Debates on how to manage property rights in the world’s informal settlements are becoming ever more pressing, as millions of people move into cities from rural areas every year and many end up in fast-growing slums.

Rio has about 1,000 slums, known locally as favelas. They are home to nearly one in four of the city’s population and typically lack a range of infrastructure and services, experts say.

In Canaa, having title would bring certainty of tenure, and also help to get services provided: sewerage, basic sanitation, and tarred streets, said Teixeira.

“I am anxious. I pray every day [for land titles],” the 59-year-old said.

When she moved to the area 22 years ago, there was a lack of all basic infrastructure in Canaa, including clean water, pavements and lighting.

Teixeira realized change had to be driven by the residents’ themselves and took the lead in trying to improve the area.

“There was nothing here. It was all jungle,” said housewife Glaucia Milani, who has been living in the favela for 25 years. “Now things are getting better because of Dona Edir’s help.”

Milani said apart from helping residents to get legal title to their land, Teixeira has been organising food and clothes donations for the favela and its 300 families.

“Dona Edir is a great mother to us. Anything she can help us, she helps… Dona Edir solves everything for us,” Milani, 31, said. “Dona Edir is a warrior.”

Complex situation

Getting land titles for the residents is no easy task, Teixeira said, not least because some residents have bought land from private owners, while others are squatting.

Her own plot of land was donated by an uncle of her ex-husband but neither Teixeira nor the other residents have official proof of ownership.

ITERJ, the government body in charge of managing land in the state of Rio de Janeiro and responsible for Teixeira’s request to get titles for Canaa’s residents, did not respond to requests for comment.

Most of the favela’s streets got temporary pavements about five years ago but Teixeira said it happened only after she asked a politician for help because taxis were refusing to enter Canaa because the roads were full of potholes.

Despite Teixeira’s efforts, the residents in the favela about 65 kilometers (40 miles) from Rio’s city center are still waiting for the streets to be fully paved, sidewalks to be built and manholes to be constructed.

Teixeira has asked the city to fully pave the streets, provide sewerage infrastructure and a health post for the favela.

In emailed comments to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Rio’s city hall said the favela was “urbanized” four years ago but did not immediately respond to requests for details about which services were provided to the area.

Fighting for justice

A “very shocking scene” at school when Teixeira was eight years old prompted her decision to dedicate her life to fighting justice, she said.

While she and a boy were having a snack during a school break, another girl asked the boy to give her a piece.

“The boy said: only if you spread your legs,” she said. “Then she immediately spread her legs and … he gave her a bite. That broke my heart.”

At 15, Teixeira was raped and later witnessed the rape of a friend, experiences she said strengthened her resolve to help women.

Teixeira has been working for many years as a volunteer at a charity that distributes food in Rio’s poor neighborhoods, including Canaa.

She was honored for her work with a prize from the Federação de Mulheres Fluminenses, a Rio-based women’s federation.

Meanwhile, Teixeira, who survives on her father’s pension and cleans houses to make money, spends whatever she can of her income — equivalent to $300 a month — on building a school in the patio of her house.

“I do the construction works myself. When there is any money left I pay a professional to do the harder things,” she said.

Beyond literacy, her school will offer a range of classes: cooking, sewing, handicrafts and theater.

“That is my dream. … My dream is to take the kids off the street … because they have nothing to do [here],” she said in tears.

“There are lots of volunteers. What is missing is money to finish the school.”

Teixeira hopes the city will officially recognize Canaa as the favela’s name — it is the Portuguese version of Canaan and was chosen by her in reference to a passage from the Bible of a land promised by God to chosen people.

“We have to have faith. The faith in God is what keeps me standing. And the victories make me keep going,” said Teixeira.
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European Union finance ministers agreed new measures on Tuesday to force accountants and banks to report aggressive tax schemes that help companies shift profits to low-tax countries.

Ministers also added the Bahamas, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Saint Kitts and Nevis to a blacklist of tax havens, while Bahrain, the Marshall Islands and Saint Lucia were delisted, confirming earlier Reuters reports.

Under the rules, proposed by the European Commission in June, accountants, banks and lawyers would be required to inform authorities about “potentially aggressive tax planning arrangements” set up for their clients. The 28 EU states will also share information on harmful tax planning in a bid to discourage the most aggressive tax avoidance schemes.

“It is a new progress for tax justice in the European Union,” EU tax commissioner Pierre Moscovici told ministers after they agreed the overhaul.

Once the new rules are finalized and approved by the European Parliament, tax advisers in the EU will risk fines if they do not report potentially harmful cross-border tax schemes.

Penalties should be “effective, proportionate and dissuasive” but EU states will maintain discretion in setting sanctions or fines at national level.

If there is no intermediary, or the tax adviser is located outside the EU, the company or individual using the arrangement will be obliged to disclose it.

EU governments agreed on a compromise text put forward by the Bulgarian presidency of the EU, which slightly softened the Commission’s original proposal. Tax reforms require unanimity among the 28 member states.

Cross-border tax arrangements set up with jurisdictions that have a zero or “almost zero” corporate rate – such as the Channel Islands, Bahamas, Bahrain and the Cayman Islands – must be reported, despite initial opposition from some governments.

But ministers scrapped a requirement to report tax schemes with jurisdictions whose corporate rate is lower than 35 percent of the statutory average within the EU – which could have forced reporting for schemes involving countries with a tax rate

of around 7 percent.

Some states had argued such a requirement “would cause an administrative burden disproportionate to the objectives” of the new rules, a working document prepared by Bulgarian officials showed.

Smaller EU members like Luxembourg and Malta have in the past opposed stricter rules to prevent tax avoidance, fearing they could harm competitiveness. But their finance ministers gave the green light to the Bulgarian compromise. Some members, including Britain, Ireland and Portugal, have already introduced penalties at a national level for intermediaries helping set up aggressive tax schemes.

EU governments also added Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, Dominica and Antigua and Barbuda to a “grey list,” which now includes 62 jurisdictions that do not respect EU anti-tax avoidance standards but have committed to change their practices.

Bulgarian Finance Minister Vladislav Goranov told a news conference after the meeting that commitments made by grey list countries will be made public, a move welcomed by anti-corruption groups because it will increase transparency.

Ministers agreed to move Bahrain, the Marshall Islands and Saint Lucia from the black to the grey list, after they committed to change their tax practices.

American Samoa, Guam, Namibia, Palau, Samoa, and Trinidad and Tobago were already on the blacklist set up in December.

Blacklisted jurisdictions could face reputational damage and stricter controls on their financial transactions with the EU, although no sanctions have been agreed by EU states yet.

 
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Thailand’s cabinet has agreed to draft a law to regulate cryptocurrency trading, seeking to tax the largely unregulated market.

Government spokesman Nathporn Chatusripitak said Tuesday the Ministry of Finance also proposed the new regulations to help prevent use of digital currencies in money laundering and fraud.

He said details of the proposed regulations would be announced later in the month.

In February, Thailand’s central bank issued a circular asking financial institutions to not handle transactions involving cryptocurrencies.
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The daily commute from Mexico to California farms is the same as it was before Donald Trump became president. Hundreds of Mexicans cross the border and line the sidewalks of Calexico’s tiny downtown by 4 a.m., napping on cardboard sheets and blankets or sipping coffee from a 24-hour doughnut shop until buses leave for the fields.

For decades, cross-border commuters have picked lettuce, carrots, broccoli, onions, cauliflower and other vegetables that make California’s Imperial Valley “America’s Salad Bowl” from December through March. As Trump visits the border Tuesday, the harvest is a reminder of how little has changed despite heated immigration rhetoric in Washington.

Trump will inspect eight prototypes for a future 30-foot border wall that were built in San Diego last fall. He made a “big, beautiful wall” a centerpiece of his campaign and said Mexico would pay for it.

But border barriers extend the same 654 miles (1,046 kilometers) they did under President Barack Obama and so far Trump hasn’t gotten Mexico or Congress to pay for a new wall.

Trump also pledged to expand the Border Patrol by 5,000 agents, but staffing fell during his first year in office farther below a congressional mandate because the government has been unable to keep pace with attrition and retirements. There were 19,437 agents at the end of September, down from 19,828 a year earlier.

In Tijuana, tens of thousands of commuters still line up weekday mornings for San Diego at the nation’s busiest border crossing, some for jobs in landscaping, housekeeping, hotel maids and shipyard maintenance. The vast majority are U.S. citizens and legal residents or holders of “border crossing cards” that are given to millions of Mexicans in border areas for short visits. The border crossing cards do not include work authorization but some break the rules.

Even concern about Trump’s threat to end the North American Free Trade Agreement is tempered by awareness that border economies have been integrated for decades. Mexican “maquiladora” plants, which assemble duty-free raw materials for export to the U.S., have made televisions, medical supplies and other goods since the 1960s.

“How do you separate twins that are joined at the hip?” said Paola Avila, chairwoman of the Border Trade Alliance, a group that includes local governments and business chambers. “Our business relationships will continue to grow regardless of what happens with NAFTA.”

Workers in the Mexicali area rise about 1 a.m., carpool to the border crossing and wait about an hour to reach Calexico’s portico-covered sidewalks by 4 a.m. Some beat the border bottleneck by crossing at midnight to sleep in their cars in Calexico, a city of 40,000 about 120 miles (192 kilometers) east of San Diego. 

Fewer workers make the trek now than 20 and 30 years ago. But not because of Trump. 

Steve Scaroni, one of Imperial Valley’s largest labor contractors, blames the drop on lack of interest among younger Mexicans, which has forced him to rely increasingly on short-term farmworker visas known as H-2As. 

“We have a saying that no one is raising their kids to be farmworkers,” said Scaroni, 55, a third-generation grower and one of Imperial Valley’s largest labor contractors. Last week, he had two or three buses of workers leaving Calexico before dawn, compared to 15 to 20 buses during the 1980s and 1990s.

Crop pickers at Scaroni’s Fresh Harvest Inc. make $13.18 an hour but H-2As bring his cost to $20 to $30 an hour because he must pay for round-trip transportation, sometimes to southern Mexico, and housing. The daily border commuters from Mexicali cost only $16 to $18 after overhead.

Scaroni’s main objective is to expand the H-2A visa program, which covered about 165,000 workers in 2016. On his annual visit to Washington in February to meet members of Congress and other officials, he decided within two hours that nothing changed under Trump. 

“Washington is not going to fix anything,” he said. “You’ve got too many people – lobbyists, politicians, attorneys – who make money off the dysfunction. They make money off of not solving problems. They just keep talking about it.”

Jose Angel Valenzuela, who owns a house in Mexicali and is working his second harvest in Imperial Valley, earns more picking cabbage in an hour than he did in a day at a factory in Mexico. He doesn’t pay much attention to news and isn’t following developments on the border wall.

“We’re doing very well,” he said as workers passed around beef tacos during a break. “We haven’t seen any noticeable change.”

Jack Vessey, whose family farms about 10,000 acres in Imperial Valley, relies on border commuters for about half of his workforce. Imperial has only 175,000 people and Mexicali has about 1 million, making Mexico an obvious labor pool.

Vessey, 42, said he has seen no change on the border and doesn’t expect much. He figures 10 percent of Congress embraces open immigration policies, another 10 percent oppose them and the other 80 percent don’t want to touch it because their voters are too divided.

“It’s like banging your head against the wall,” he said. 
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Chile’s new government is preparing belt-tightening measures after inheriting a larger-than-anticipated fiscal deficit from its predecessor, but the measures will stop short of “mega-adjustments,” Finance Minister Felipe Larrain said on Monday.

Conservative billionaire Sebastian Pinera took office on Sunday vowing to combat economic “stagnation” and calling for a return to “fiscal equilibrium” as he seeks to transform Chile into a developed nation within a decade.

“We’re in a period of tight budgets, with levels of public debt that have doubled, which means we must begin with austerity measures, followed by a reassigning resources, in order to finance the president’s program,” Larrain told reporters as he entered the finance ministry for his first day on the job.

Shortly before leaving office, outgoing President Michelle Bachelet’s government reported it had left a fiscal deficit of 2.1 percent of gross domestic product, instead of 1.7 percent as targeted.

Chile’s Congress this year authorized an increase in public spending of 3.9 percent, which Pinera had previously criticized as “high.”

“These austerity measures, and the wise use of resources, are always welcome and are necessary. But we’re not talking about mega-adjustments, we’re talking about austerity measures,” Larrain said.

During his campaign, Pinera, who also governed from 2010 to 2014, said he hoped to guide the country to fiscal equilibrium within six to eight years.
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U.S. President Donald Trump is blocking Singapore-based Broadcom, maker of computer and smartphone chips, from taking over U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm.

Trump cited national security grounds in stopping the takeover, following the recommendation of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). The committee reviews national security implications when foreign entities purchase U.S. corporations.

The president’s order said there is “credible evidence” that the takeover “might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States.”

Broadcom made an unsolicited bid last year to take over Qualcomm for $117 billion.

The company has been in the process of moving its legal headquarters from Singapore to the United States to help it win approval for the takeover.

Qualcomm, which is based in San Diego, has emerged as one of the biggest competitors to Chinese companies, such as Huawei Technologies, making it an attractive asset for potential buyers in the semiconductor industry.

Companies in the industry are racing against each other to develop 5G wireless technology to transmit data at faster speeds.
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Eurozone creditors are expected to disburse new loans to Greece this month and are working on debt relief measures, the head of the bloc’s finance ministers said on Monday, steps that should help underpin its economic recovery.

Greece’s 86-billion-euro bailout program, its third since 2010, is due to end in August and international lenders are debating how to ensure the country makes its exit on a sustainable footing.

Among options under consideration in Brussels are support measures that could run into tens of billions of euros and help ease servicing costs on a public debt pile that, in terms of economic output, is among the biggest in the world.

Greece’s economy expanded by 1.6 percent last year after emerging from a long recession. The European Commission forecast growth of 2.5 percent this year and next, but that rate could slow if reforms stall after strict monitoring by the lenders ceases.

The eurozone bailout fund is expected to pay out a 5.7 billion euro loan later in March, Eurogroup head Mario Centeno told a news conference following the finance ministers’ monthly meeting, after Greece met commitments under the third review of its rescue program.

To successfully exit the program, a fourth review of 88 reform actions must be completed before August. This would allow Greece to access other loans.

“I am confident Greece will implement all remaining deliverables to conclude the program successfully,” Centeno said.

They include new privatizations and reform of the gas and electricity markets, which he said were preconditions to granting Greece new debt relief.

Debt relief

Technical talks are already ongoing on one of the possible measures that would grant Greece additional debt relief after it benefited from extensions of its debt maturities and other short-term aid in past years.

Centeno said that work was under way on linking future eurozone debt relief to the rate of Greek economic growth, with the objective of granting support if growth slowed.

Other more substantial measures will be discussed at the next meeting of finance ministers next month, Centeno said.

Among possible measures are the use of funds that will remain unused after the bailout program ends on August 20.

This could be as mush as 27 billion euros, and could be used to buy out Greek debt falling due in the next five years and replace it with cheaper and longer-term loans from the eurozone bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

Another option could involve the return of profits made by the European Central Bank on Greek bonds.

Both measures would come with conditions attached, mostly linked to the implementation of reforms already approved but that would take years to fully execute.

The debate on conditionality is still wide open. Greece could ask for a new credit line after its aid programme ends, but this is likely to be seen in the country as a new wave of austerity, triggering a political backlash.

Alternatives could entail enhanced supervision by EU institutions over Greek reforms after the bailout ends.

Without a financial safety net Greece could face market pressure that would increase debt servicing costs.

Greece is also building a cash buffer, which could reach 20 billion euros, to bolster a full return to debt markets and support sustainable growth.
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Mexico’s powerful CCE business lobby on Monday urged the leftist front-runner for a July 1 presidential election to stop questioning major planks of the government’s economic agenda lest it damage investment.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has led opinion polls by a wide margin for weeks, has gradually moderated his rhetoric and his leading advisers have sought to reassure investors that he will not be an economic liability as president.

However, his threats to scrap a new Mexico City airport already under construction and review oil and gas exploration and production contracts issued under a 2013-14 energy reform still worry some investors.

“As we’ve said, you can’t ask the private sector to take part in building a better country at the same time as undermining certainty and the rule of law as conditions for fostering investment,” Juan Pablo Castanon, president of the powerful CCE lobby, an umbrella group for business groups, said at an event in Mexico City.

“For this reason, we businessfolk demand guarantees that the contracts awarded under the energy reform and for the new airport will be respected,” he added. “In a country governed by the rule of law, contracts are honored, and cannot be subject to the will or interpretation of a sitting government.”

Lopez Obrador’s top energy adviser has said that while publicly available versions of the energy contracts appear to be without problems, further investigation was needed to ensure corruption had not tainted the awarding process.

The business community was also worried there were candidates and campaign teams already casting doubt on the validity of the election “depending on who the winner is,” Castanon said, without mentioning Lopez Obrador or his MORENA party.

Castanon’s comments follow a high-profile speech by Lopez Obrador at a banking convention last week, in which he stuck to promises to not build a new airport at the current construction site and warned there could be protests if he lost by fraud.

The former mayor of Mexico City, who was runner-up in the previous two elections, organized massive protests in the capital when he was narrowly beaten for the presidency in 2006.

Two polls published last week showed him with a lead of more than 13 percentage points over his nearest rival.
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