One demand is that the Eskom debt related to Hitachi’s central role in Medupi and another coal-fired power plant, Kusile, be repudiated, in part to prevent a 32% increase in Eskom’s electricity price next year. In addition, the Bank lent more than $3 billion in 2010 for what was the world’s largest coal-fired power plant under construction, a project rife with corruption – especially bribery of the ruling party by Tokyo-based Hitachi – already well known at the time, and successfully prosecuted under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the United States in 2015. The financing included not only apartheid-era loans that exacerbated parastatal energy supplier Eskom’s official racist policies from 1951-67 and neoliberal policy advice during the transition from apartheid to democracy in 1994. Throughout its 71-year history in South Africa, the World Bank financed episodes of high-carbon, anti-social mega-project maldevelopment. The main call was for repudiation of a massive loan – the Bank’s largest-ever project credit – made a dozen years earlier but still causing enormous financial and climate damage: the Medupi coal-fired power plant. Nearly 100 protesters from community, environment and youth groups joined Extinction Rebellion and the campaign outside the World Bank’s Johannesburg office on Friday, October 14, the second such event in the last eight months. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund Annual Meetings have witnessed protests in Washington and many other sites.
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