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• The super-rich are driving inequality and the climate crisis by hoarding wealth, investing in carbon polluting industries, and avoiding taxation – while the rest of us struggle with soaring energy costs, underfunded public services, and climate impacts like heatwaves and floods.
• Yet instead of taxing them properly, governments give billionaires a free pass and cut funding for vital public services while the rich get richer.
• The richest 1% produce as much carbon pollution as two-thirds of humanity while paying next to nothing in taxes.
• Billionaires like Elon Musk actively undermine democracy by funding far-right politicians and policies that serve their interests at the expense of our welfare and our planet.
• Governments claim to lack funds to invest in renewable energy and public services – but if they raised taxes on those most able to pay a little more, they could raise billions in additional tax revenue. Just a 2% tax on assets over £10 million would affect only 20,000 people (a TINY proportion of the population) yet could raise £24 billion a year!
• The majority of the British public supports taxing extreme wealth – along with unions, charities and even millionaires themselves!

Won’t the rich just leave if we raise taxes?

Despite common claims from media and politicians that billionaires and multi-millionaires would leave at the drop of a hat if taxes on extreme wealth were increased slightly, there is little evidence to support this. Tax Justice UK recently released a report called “The millionaire exodus myth” which addresses this head on. They found:

• Millionaires are “highly immobile” and none of the findings provide any evidence that tax played any role in any relocation of wealthy individuals.
• The methodology used in reports suggesting a “millionaire exodus” which have been extremely widely shared across print and online news is flawed and claims are contradictory. The media has often also misreported or exaggerated the findings.

Isn’t it bad for business?

You could argue that allowing a small number of people to accrue ‘unused’ wealth is actually worse for the economy than ensuring millions of people have fair wages, affordable green energy and thriving public services. Redistribution can ensure working people have more disposable income, thus raising demand for goods and services and benefiting British businesses and high streets.

Tax Their Billions: How and why the super-rich should pay to help fix the climate crisis

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• Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is one of Russia’s allies in Europe. He claims that the EU is helping Ukraine at the expense of European interests and that Hungary will not quit Russian oil and gas. Experts and the press suspect that the Russian authorities have given Orban’s inner circle the opportunity to earn hundreds of millions of dollars from energy commodities trading.
• At the center of attention is the mysterious trader of Russian oil, Normeston Trading, which in 2009 got half of a gas trader created by Hungary’s largest oil and gas company, MOL, and then transferred its stake to Orban’s friends and their partners.
• Normeston Trading itself, on the Hungarian side, is co-owned by people affiliated with Orban’s friends. For years, the press and experts have tried to understand how Normeston could be connected to Russia’s top political circles.
• IStories found out that the former Russian owner of Normeston — race car driver Lev Tolkachev — was also a business partner of Gennady Timchenko’s top-managers. Vladimir Putin's close friend Timtchenko was the biggest Russian oil trader before 2014 sanctions. One of his former managers, Aleksandr Zhuravlev, still sits on the boards of some companies in the Normeston group together with the race car driver.
• In 2017 and 2018, Cyprus-based Normeston Trading was “under common control” with the Russian company of the race car driver, which was half-owned by another Timchenko top manager — Sergey Gzhelyak. In Cyprus, “common control” means that the companies are owned or their finances are controlled by the same parties.
• After the race car driver, the Russian businessman Valery Subbotin became a co-owner of Normeston. Subbotin is a former vice president of Lukoil, who fled from Russia in 2016 and settled in Europe, but established business ties with Putin’s friends and the entourage of former pro-Kremlin Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.

Beyond staff cuts, the departures of some longtime investigators in recent months have left less experienced people tasked with rooting out dangerous manufacturing practices.

Marhanets, a town where more than 40 thousand people lived before the full-scale war, has been terrorized by Russians for over three years. The town has frequent power and water shortages, and the residents suffer from regular artillery shelling and drone attacks from the occupied Enerhodar on the left bank of the Dnipro, which is seven kilometres away in a straight line.

While the town is struggling to survive, Hennadii Borovyk, the mayor of Marhanets, makes money. In a year and a half, the local “Agency of municipal services”, ensuring the heating for the critical infrastructure, has made over seventy agreements for a total of UAH 123 million, more than UAH 112 million of which were received by only four entrepreneurs, directly related to Borovyk.

NGL.media investigated how the provision for municipal needs can be transformed into one’s own business.