Googling 'pacte colonial' and other terms does not get me far outside the blogosphere. No wiki, hardly anything on Google Scholar. The World Bank never seems to have written an opinion about it. Hard to believe, at least in this form.<p>As a counter example, I Googled for Chinese investments in those countries, and found a lot of information / news. That seems to run against the 'Ownership of natural resources'-paragraph.<p>A last thought: it's about monetary operations for the workings of a common currency. You don't exactly lose money when depositing it at a central bank. The system they describe in pretty harsh terms (google it) , sounds like a scheme pretty normally practiced between banks and central banks.