PROTESTERS urging Jersey to stop speculators using Island courts to force poor African countries into pay crippling debts were outside the Supreme Court in London yesterday.

They lined the Westminster pavement with placards on the opening day of an appeal before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council involving a Congolese mining company and a so-called vulture fund, FG Hemisphere.

Vulture funds buy up millions of pounds of debt owed by some of the world’s poorest countries and find courts around the world where the countries have assets to recover the money.

FG Hemisphere came to Jersey because the Congolese mining company, which claims it is not owned by the Democratic Republic of Congo, is based in the Island.