Somali Pirates in Discussions to Acquire Citigroup

By Andreas Hippin
November 20 (Bloomberg) — The Somali pirates, renegade Somalis known for hijacking ships for ransom in the Gulf of Aden, are negotiating a purchase of Citigroup.

The pirates would buy Citigroup with new debt and their existing cash stockpiles, earned most recently from hijacking numerous ships, including most recently a $200 million Saudi Arabian oil tanker. The Somali pirates are offering up to $0.10 per share for Citigroup, pirate spokesman Sugule Ali said earlier today. The negotiations have entered the final stage, Ali said.

“You may not like our price, but we are not in the business of paying for things. Be happy we are in the mood to offer the shareholders anything,” said Ali.

The pirates will finance part of the purchase by selling new Pirate Ransom Backed Securities. The PRBS’s are backed by the cash flows from future ransom payments from hijackings in the Gulf of Aden. Moody’s and S&P have already issued their top investment grade ratings for the PRBS’s. …

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China is managing to succeed—by putting in place its tremendous industrial renovation programs, starting up monitoring for emissions, and encouraging green building and sustainable resource use, all while protecting its culture and its people. … Even if all of China’s people are not wealthy themselves, they know their country is, she says. “A fundamental change that’s happened in the last 10 years [is that they have become] wealthy enough as a society to say, ‘We are going to be among the first rank.’ Development is more than just industry; modernity means quality health care, education, clean water—[and] environmental as well as other social services.”  “It’s not going to be perfect,” Seligsohn says, “but I am quite convinced that 5 years from now, you’ll look at the sky [in Beijing], and it’s going to be substantially better.”

BBC NEWS Arms embargo hurts Ivorian fishing

Ivory Coast is calling on the United Nations to lift an arms embargo that it says has prevented the defence of its waters from illegal fishing boats. The falling catches are not only a result of over-fishing, but also of illegal fishing techniques. “These pirates don’t follow the international rules for fishing because they’re thieves,” says Mr Djobo. “This all means we’ve seen a drastic decline in the catches of fishermen in our waters.”

Alex Steffen of WorldChanging writes about John Robb’s security focused idea of Resilient Community:

John’s posts themselves tend to focus on work-arounds for brittle infrastructure, things like smart local networks (sort of the information equivalent of energy smart grids), community scrip and local fabrication …But I worry as well about the role these sorts of ideas seem to often end up playing in the public debate. … Because, it bears repeating again and again and again, responses based purely on localism and scaling-back can’t save us now. We need to remake our material civilization.

Also, the Stockholm Resilience Centre has launched a new monthly electronic newsletter. The first issue presents recent news from the centre.  To subscribe, go to www.stockholmresilience.su.se and enter your email address under ‘Subscribe to newsletter’ in the right column.

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