The world's ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion --at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion a day-- during the first two years of a pandemic that has seen the incomes of 99 per cent of humanity fall and over 160 million more people forced into poverty, according to an Oxfam International report released on Monday.

"If these ten men were to lose 99.999 per cent of their wealth tomorrow, they would still be richer than 99 per cent of all the people on this planet," Oxfam International's Executive Director Gabriela Bucher said in the report. "They now have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people," she added.