Blip

About this episode

Bong Reza, a board member of Marinduque's provincial council describes the problems that local governments face in providing services and functioning effectively when corporate mining firms avoid paying taxes at the local level. In this case the Marcopper mining firm avoided paying real property tax totalling one billion philippines pesos over the period of more than a decade, leaving the local government with poor coffers despite the fact that the company was making vast profits from the Marinduquens' copper and gold resources. In the Philippines,over generous tax incentives and local tax avoidance by large companies leave the majority of the Philippines' poorest people with little prospect of rising out of poverty.

• Release Date

  Jun 19, 2009

• Runtime

  01:13