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oxfam international
In 'Grotesque Billionaire Bonanza,' 41 Energy Tycoons Saw Fortunes Grow by $23.5 Billion Since Trump Launched Iran War
“Conflict devastates countries and costs countless lives, yet for some it is extraordinarily profitable,” said the executive director of Oxfam International.
Jun 15, 2026
While much of the world is holding out hope that the US-Israeli war against Iran may finally be reaching an end amid news of a ceasefire agreement, the billionaire owners of some of the world's largest energy companies may not be so thrilled.
A handful of just 41 energy industry barons in Group of Seven (G7) countries collectively increased their wealth by $23.5 billion since the war was launched in late February, according to a report released by Oxfam International on Monday, as the leaders of the world's largest industrialized economies meet in France this week.
The oil shocks resulting from the war have caused fuel prices to spike dramatically, rippling inflation throughout the global economy and straining the pocketbooks of ordinary people around the world. One April report by the United Nations Development Program projected that, as a result of the conflict, an additional 32 million people would be pushed into poverty by the end of the year.
But between March 1 and May 18, owners of the largest oil and energy companies in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the US, and the UK were adding $300 million on average per day to their collective wealth, Oxfam found through an analysis of Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaire List.
PRESS RELEASE: G7 energy billionaires pocket $300 million a day since start of unlawful US and Israel war against Iran.
This is equivalent to about $1,000 in the time it takes to blink.
👀https://t.co/UVGHF4a3Tk pic.twitter.com/szSGASCAX8
— Oxfam International Media Team (@newsfromoxfam) June 15, 2026
“Conflict devastates countries and costs countless lives, yet for some it is extraordinarily profitable,” said Oxfam International's executive director Amitabh Behar. “This is a brutal system that redistributes wealth upwards—from workers to shareholders, from the poorest to the richest, from those with the least power to those who already have far too much of it. While families are skipping meals and governments slash life-saving aid, we are witnessing a grotesque billionaire bonanza.”
While their accumulation of wealth cannot solely be attributed to the war, Oxfam noted that the Big Six oil companies—Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Exxon, and TotalEnergies—are projected to grow their profits this year by 80% above the pre-war forecast, while the average large G7 company in the sample is projected to see just 8% growth.
Global billionaires saw their wealth increase on average by about 0.42% between March and mid-May. During the same period, G7 billionaires in the energy industry grew their riches by 9%, while those in oil and gas specifically became nearly 11% richer.
Oxfam notes that the Iran War has only widened the chasm between the rich and poor that was already gaping, in no small part thanks to nations in the G7.
While billionaire wealth has surged by nearly $10 trillion since 2020, G7 nations, mostly the US under President Donald Trump, have reduced aid to the poorest nations by $48 billion—equivalent to what billionaires in G7 countries accumulated for themselves in just nine days.
Meanwhile, since 2019, the last time France chaired a G7 summit, Oxfam estimated that 44 people per minute have come to be in need of humanitarian aid, based on 2025 data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
.@Oxfam campaigners posing as #G7 leaders stand around a trash can overflowing with discarded files. The labels read: “gender inequality,” “climate,” and “tax the rich” —critical global issues scrubbed from the agenda to secure President Trump’s attendance at the G7 summit.@AP pic.twitter.com/aE7HkMvKFl
— Oxfam International Media Team (@newsfromoxfam) June 15, 2026
Behar said that in order to secure the participation of the US in this week’s summit, French President Emmanuel Macron has chosen to table any discussions that might offend Trump—including the devastating cost of his war in Iran, Israel’s US-backed wars in Gaza and Lebanon, and anything to do with the climate crisis, which Trump has referred to as "a scam."
"Rather than defending collective governance, Macron and his peers are accommodating its destruction. This will have consequences measured in lives," he said.
Oxfam called for the "G6"—all the Group of Seven member countries, excluding the US—to create a comprehensive plan to protect people from the economic turmoil caused by the war and other spiraling global crises.
“The G6 can’t plead powerlessness,” Behar added. “They can cancel debt. They can tax windfall profits and extreme wealth... They can provide poorer countries with aid. Refusing to act simply because Washington will not join them is not diplomacy—it is cowardice. And it will only accelerate the G6’s slide into global irrelevance.”
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‘A System Rigged’: Untaxed Wealth of Richest 0.1% Is More Than Assets of World’s Poorest Half
A decade after the Panama Papers, the global rich are still hiding more than $2.8 trillion in tax havens. Just a fraction of that money could end extreme hunger and provide clean water to everyone on Earth.
Apr 02, 2026
The richest 0.1% of people on Earth are hiding more than $2.8 trillion in offshore accounts to avoid taxes. That money alone is more wealth than is owned by the entire bottom half of humanity, more than 4.1 billion people.
These findings were published in a report released Thursday by Oxfam International on the 10th anniversary of the 2016 Panama Papers, which provided an unprecedented look at how the world's most powerful capitalists, financiers, political leaders, celebrities, and criminals exploited offshore tax havens to stash their money.
"Ten years on, the superrich are still sequestering oceans of wealth in offshore vaults,” said Christian Hallum, Oxfam International’s tax lead.
The percentage of untaxed wealth in offshore accounts has dropped in the past 10 years, in large part due to global reforms like the adoption of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Automatic Exchange of Information framework (AEOI), which allows revenue authorities around the world to easily share information and crack down on cheats.
However, many nations in the Global South are excluded from this system, even though they need the tax revenue the most.
Oxfam found that a staggering $3.5 trillion, more than 3.2% of the global gross domestic product, still remains in untaxed accounts. That's more than the entire GDP of France and is more than twice the combined wealth of the world's 44 poorest nations.
And while the percentage of untaxed wealth is shrinking, that doesn't mean inequality has shrunk.
On the contrary, the December 2025 "World Inequality Report" found that the richest 0.001% of humanity—fewer than 60,000 multimillionaires and billionaires—now have three times as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population combined.
Inequality has surged around the world in part due to taxation policies and pandemic recovery packages that overwhelmingly favor the rich. The most glaring was adopted in the world's financial hub, the United States, last year.
The megabudget passed by Republicans and signed into law by President Donald Trump handed a $1 trillion tax cut to America's wealthiest 1% while slashing more than $1 trillion in spending from Medicaid, food assistance, and other safety net programs. It has been described by some economists as the largest upward transfer of wealth in US history.
While the global top 0.1% holds about 80% of untaxed offshore wealth, an even smaller group of uber-wealthy individuals does most of the cheating. The world's richest 0.01%, who hold at least $50 million apiece, control about half of all money in global tax shelters—$1.7 trillion.
According to the Tax Justice Network's Corporate Tax Haven Index, Caribbean islands under UK ownership, including the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, and Bermuda, are among the worst offenders. Other notable tax havens include Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, and the Netherlands.
A February Oxfam report on Elon Musk, who is well on his way to becoming the world's first trillionaire, found that his company, Tesla—which managed to pay zero dollars on its $2.3 billion income in 2024—has not published a country-by-country report on its taxes and that it has subsidiaries in many countries considered to be tax havens.
Big Pharma companies, including AbbVie and Merck, also used tax shelters to lower their total tax expense in 2025 by more than $1 billion, according to a report released earlier this month by the Financial Accountability & Corporate Transparency Coalition.
"This isn’t just about clever accounting—it’s about power and impunity," Hallum said. "When millionaires and billionaires stash trillions of dollars in offshore tax havens, they place themselves above the obligations that bind the rest of society."
"The consequences are as predictable as they are devastating," he continued. "We see our public hospitals and schools starved of funds, our social fabric shredded by rising inequality, and ordinary people forced to shoulder the costs of a system rigged to enrich a tiny few.”
Even a fraction of the money currently stashed away by the world's wealthiest could alleviate untold amounts of suffering.
In November, the United Nations' World Food Program estimated that extreme hunger, which currently affects more than 318 million people around the world, could be eradicated by 2030 with investments of about $93 billion per year, but that global hunger programs instead remain “slow, fragmented, and underfunded."
According to a 2021 UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report, investments of around $114 billion per year would similarly be enough to ensure that everyone on Earth has access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
Oxfam called on governments around the world to increase coordination to prevent the wealthy from hiding their riches from tax authorities. It also urged them to adopt more aggressive policies to tax the 1%'s wealth at home, including taxes on income and on extreme wealth.
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Report Shows How to End 'Climate Colonialism' and Ensure a Just Transition for Global South
"A just transition must redistribute power and resources, curb overconsumption, and prioritize dignity and rights for all," Oxfam International stresses in a new report.
Sep 24, 2025
A report published Wednesday details how "climate colonialism" of wealthier nations "hijacks" investment and profits from the Global South—and lays out how the world can "move beyond extractive models and build an energy system rooted in equality, justice, care, and collective prosperity."
The Oxfam International report notes that "the global energy transition stands at a pivotal moment: It can either dismantle the inequalities driving the climate crisis or deepen them. Today, the transition risks reproducing patterns of extractivism and exploitation, with the most marginalized paying the highest price while elites profit."
"From transition mineral mining to debt burdens and unequal energy access, the current trajectory mirrors centuries of colonial injustice," the publication states. "A just transition must redistribute power and resources, curb overconsumption, and prioritize dignity and rights for all."
The report continues:
Today, the warning signs are clear: The global renewable energy transition is being built on unequal foundations. We are witnessing climate inequality inaction: a transition focused on replacing fossil fuels with green alternatives, without questioning the excessive energy use of the richest, while often leaving lower-income communities to bear the greatest costs, including through the harmful impacts of transition mineral mining, inadequate benefit sharing, and global financial and trade systems rigged against their interests. Put simply, the same dynamics that drove historical colonialism are reaemerging in new forms through the green transition.
These patterns of inequality play out both between and within countries. While stark inequalities exist between the richest and poorest within high-income countries too, global inequality is most sharply felt in the Global South, where structural barriers and historic injustices have left entire nations bearing the brunt of the climate crisis and now shouldering the greatest risks in the renewable energy transition.
"Unless the logic underpinning the transition changes, it will continue to replicate the history of extractivism and exploitation," the report warns. "These inequalities intersect with gender, race, class, age, and other marginalized people or groups, meaning that the costs of an unjust transition fall heaviest on Indigenous peoples, Black communities and other racialized groups, women, workers, peasants, and of course young people and future generations."
"This concentration of wealth and power is mirrored in patterns of energy use: A small minority live in extreme luxury and overconsume planetary resources, while others still lack basic electricity," the report's authors wrote. "If just one year’s energy consumption of the wealthiest 1% were redistributed, it could meet the modern energy needs of all the people in the world without electricity seven times over, while redistributing the consumption of the top 10% global energy consumers could meet the needs of the entire Global South nine times over."
The report also highlights how a "colonial financial system" plays a key role in perpetuating injustice, noting that "while rich countries can pour billions into their own clean energy transitions, the Global South is left with rising debt, punishing interest rates, and shrinking fiscal space."
For every #ElectricVehicle that contains about 3kg of cobalt mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tesla earns approximately $3,150 in profit. While the DRC government receives less than $10 in royalties and the average miner earns just $7!📢 Read our new report to learn more: oxf.am/3W68E2o
[image or embed]
— Oxfam International (@oxfaminternational.bsky.social) September 24, 2025 at 6:46 AM
According to Oxfam:
In 2024, high-income countries accounted for roughly 50% of global clean energy investment, and China for 29%, while Africa accounted for just 2%, despite sub-Saharan Africa being home to 85% of all the people in the world without electricity. The inequality is not only in where finance flows, but in how much it costs: Clean energy projects in the Global South face interest rates of 9–13.5%, compared with just 3–6% in richer countries, slowing the pace of the transition. These costs are not inevitable—they reflect a system that prices risk through the racialized lens of colonial legacies. The impact is stark: Powering 100,000 people with clean energy costs about $95 million in advanced economies like the UK, but $139 million (45% higher) in emerging economies such as India and $188 million (97% higher) in African countries such as Nigeria.
How does the Global South reclaim its energy future from climate colonialism? According to the report's authors, "Rather than treating the energy future as a race with few winners, we must reimagine it as a shared global project."
"Energy should not be hoarded, withheld, or used as leverage for geopolitical or corporate power," the report advises. "This structural change requires reparative justice: making rich polluters pay, redistributing resources, confronting overconsumption, and prioritizing the rights of those historically excluded while embracing economic models that put equality, well-being, and ecological limits at the center.
"Tackling inequality is both a moral imperative and an effective strategy for climate mitigation," the authors stressed, offering the following recommendations:
- Differentiating transition pathways based on historical responsibility and capacity;
- Working toward more equitable energy consumption;
- Reforming trade, investment, and taxation systems;
- Replacing extractive financial models with debt cancellation, grant-based climate finance, and reparations initiatives;
- Safeguarding communities and nature;
- Democratizing energy governance; and
- Adopting an international mechanism at the United Nations Climate Change Conference to ensure policy coherence and accelerate, consolidate, and achieve a holistic just transition.
The UN conference, or COP30—scheduled to begin November 10 in Belém, Brazil—is set to feature the theme of a just transition as a central agenda item.
"There is no single blueprint for a just transition—it will differ across contexts, shaped by diverse histories, knowledge, and needs," the Oxfam report states. "But all just transitions must share one principle: Energy should serve life, not profit."
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