ICIJ | By: Will Fitzgibbon | GPE – November 12, 2017:
A village hoped for a better life. Burkina Faso expected more tax revenue. Residents and officials said Glencore gave them neither.
Key findings:
- Burkina Faso’s tax office fined a Glencore subsidiary after allegations the company abused loopholes to avoid tax.
- The tax office said the subsidiary made “fictitious” charges to an offshore company, an allegation Glencore denies.
- Villagers have protested for years about poverty and a lack of development.
Originally published November 08, 2017: On the night of Sept. 6, 2015, Juliette Kanyala awoke to the crunch of heavy vehicles rolling across the red dirt and coming to a halt outside her home in Perkoa in the landlocked West African nation of Burkina Faso.
For most of Perkoa’s 5,000 inhabitants the sound of a four-wheeler lumbering past the sparse mud brick homes, granaries and millet fields off the central highway, signaled trouble: most often, a visitor from the multimillion-dollar zinc mine that dominates the area.
Kanyala, 37 and two months pregnant, labored to her feet and walked past her four sleeping children to the front door, rousing mongrels and chickens from quiet corners as she went.
It was the police, and they wanted her husband, Bali Xavier Bado. The son of the village chief and head of a local youth association, Bado had been among those leading protests at the mine, owned by Nantou Mining S.A., a subsidiary of the Swiss commodity giant Glencore PLC.
Bado, an assistant engineer at the mine, about 80 miles from the capital of Ouagadougou, had helped lead the men, women and children of Perkoa on a march to the mine to protest poverty, low pay and environmental damages. They had blocked the mine entrance, halting operations.
The protest was peaceful until 4 a.m. on the fourth day, when police charged and villagers scattered. A few days later, police were making unannounced visits.
They arrested one of the protesters at the market. They took another from the school. For others they came in the dark of night…
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