AID group Oxfam is known for its hard hitting reports that document the growing economic inequality around the world, and for Dhananjayan (Danny) Sriskandarajah, the chief executive of Oxfam Great Britain, this issue has been his lived experience.

Sriskandarajah was born in Sri Lanka, to Sri Lankan Tamil parents, in 1975, and initially raised in a rural community without electricity or running water. As ethnic tensions escalated to a brutal civil war in 1983, his family had moved to Papua New Guinea and then to Australia, where he went to school and university.

He arrived in the UK in 1998 as a Rhodes Scholar and completed his Masters and Doctorate in international development at University of Oxford.

“The contrast between the wealth and opportunity of life in the Global North with my early years in rural Sri Lanka has given me a passion to take on the root causes of poverty, and I am committed to Oxfam’s long-standing approach to speaking out and taking action against injustice,” he wrote in an Oxfam blog.

The charity’s report this year, titled Survival of the Richest, has revealed that billionaires had doubled their wealth over the last 10 years, with the wealthiest one per cent gaining 74 times more than the bottom 50 per cent. The report called for a permanent tax increase on the richest one per cent, with a minimum 60 per cent tax on their income from labour and capital, offering stark comparisons that hit the bull’s eye to drive the point.

Citing a report by the US investigative news group ProPublica, Oxfam said many of the world’s richest people paid hardly any taxes, with Tesla boss Elon Musk facing a ‘true tax rate’ of just 3.2 per cent between 2014-2018 and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paying less than one