Financial Transparency Coalition

If companies were people and those who violated the laws were criminals, then BAE Systems would be a repeat offender. Actually I’m not sure repeat offender even begins to cover it. Here’s some background. BAE Systems is a defense contractor with products and services for air, land, and naval forces, including electronics, intelligence, weapons, among many others. It’s a British company, but over half of its $12 billion annual sales in its land and armaments business is with the United States. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, BAE is the largest armaments company in the...

Over the last decade or so, investment banks have chronically put their profits ahead of the interests of the community. Take Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, that sold complex financial structures en masse, which helped spread toxic mortgages throughout the financial system. In 2008 our financial system nearly collapsed, in large part because of these toxic mortgages. Goldman Sachs actually profited from that meltdown, by putting millions of dollars into a subprime mortgage deal in 2007. Soon after that little stunt, the firm paid a settlement fine of $550 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for charges...

In the wake of Egypt’s revolution that forced President Hosni Mubarak to step down on February 11th, the country’s interim government has been making a lot of changes, including taking action against the former administration. The government imprisoned a host of powerful former statesmen under Mubarak including Gamal and Alaa Mubarak, sons of the former president, all of whom authorities detained for 15 days and questioned about corruption and abuse. Also imprisoned were Ahmed Nazif, the former prime minister; Zakaria Azmi, the president’s right-hand man; and Fathi Sorour, the former speaker of Parliament. In April, Egypt’s...

Since his election Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has been talking about corruption. The subject has had prominence in many of his speeches since his campaign in 2008. In September of 2009 he announced a major reform program aiming to tackle rampant corruption in his country, although he didn’t actually detail what the reform program would include. Medvedev has also repeatedly vowed to tackle corruption in the court systems, stating that Russia should do its best to “make the courts become as much as possible independent from the authorities and at the same time to absolutely depend on...