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InsideClimateNews: "How to buy a piece of a lawsuit and impoverish a country." A secretive system, called Investor-State Dispute Settlement or ISDS, disrupts climate action + forces big payouts to fossil fuel companies. "When a foreign mining company sued Greenland in 2022, the government’s lead lawyer thought he was prepared." But Paw Fruerlund found his 3-person team confronting 12 corporate lawyers from two firms representing an Australian company called Greenland Minerals. "Within months, the company’s lawyers were contesting even basic issues, like which languages emails could be written in, dragging out the case’s timeline." Turns out that while Greenland Minerals could afford to pay its own legal bills, it preferred seeking out a deep-pocketed partner. "The company struck an agreement with Burford Capital, a litigation financier, to pay those fees." 'In an arbitration case like Greenland Minerals’, these “third-party funders” generally agree to take a 20 to 50% cut of any award or settlement in exchange for assuming legal costs.' Companies like Burford have been betting on cases like Greenland Minerals’, where foreign investors sue governments before ad-hoc panels of arbitrators, since the 2000s. "The arbitrators hearing the cases are generally corporate lawyers, and the system typically operates without precedent or appeals." Greenland Minerals 'has said it could seek up to $11.5 billion if Greenland refuses to allow its operation to proceed, a figure roughly six times greater than the government’s spending last year.' The 2008 financial crisis proved to be a 'watershed moment, when hedge funds, pension funds and other institutional investors searching for alternatives to volatile financial markets began plowing billions into litigation-funding companies.' James Hollier, a portfolio manager at Silver Beech Capital Management—an asset manager invested in Burford—said, “That is a higher return combined with a longer track record [15 yrs ending in Sep2024] than almost any other private investment I can think of,” Clearly, an injustice foisted on the 60,000 people of Greenland + their government's viability.

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