#compensation

“The British government needed a generous line of credit to fulfill the terms of the Slavery Abolition Act and relied on banks to supply it. The Rothschilds, the famed banking family, stepped forward to finance the British government’s plans to pay a huge compensation to slave-owners. In 1835, under the direction of family patriarch, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who passed away soon afterward in 1836, the Rothschilds bank purchased £15 million in British government bonds on the condition of receiving various benefits. These bonds, called gilts or 3 percent consols, were perpetual. This meant that the bonds had no set redemption date and could conceivably earn interest for decades or even centuries. To finance the West India Loan, the Rothschilds also purchased additional short-term stocks worth £101,875. The government made the offer more favorable by giving the Rothschilds a 2 percent discount on the price of government bonds. This would have benefited the Rothschilds if or when they chose to sell the government debt on the bond market.[26] The Slavery Abolition Act bonds, no trace of which seems to appear at the Rothschilds Archive in London, could have been resold, for a profit, by different members of Rothschild family or else kept in perpetuity. Records show that in 1835 more than fifteen members of the Rothschild extended family held consol bonds, and many children in the family had bonds purchased in their name.[27] The Rothschild bank has refused to comment on the West India Loan bonds, and the complete ownership legacy of the bonds is still unknown.[28] These bonds continued to earn interest for 180 years, financed by the British taxpayer. Abolition debt was repeatedly repackaged, creating a tidal wave of annuity interest and remittances. The government debt represented by the Slavery Abolition Act bonds came to be divided among 11,098 different accounts, and those accounts shared the total final redemption value of £218,388,715.22 in February 2015. Over almost two centuries, black people across the British Caribbean and UK taxpayers were forced to pay a host of undisclosed beneficiaries hundreds of millions of pounds in interest on the original 1835 principal.[29]”