Financial Transparency Coalition

Nicaragua has endured a troubled history. Behind only Haiti, Nicaragua is the poorest nation in the Americas. Half of its population lives in poverty, a fifth in extreme. The county is led by President Daniel Ortega, a leader among the Sandinista, a leftist political that advocated property redistribution while it ruled throughout the 1980s. In many ways, Daniel Ortega is a contradiction. While he is politically aligned with the Sandinista, he also has distanced himself from its Marxist past. Ortega has denounced “U.S. terroristic aggression in Central America,” but ardently supported the Central...

One September 21st of this year, Italian financial police seized $30.18 million from a Vatican Bank account at a Rome branch for possible ties to money laundering. About $26 million of these funds were headed to JP Morgan in Frankfurt and the remainder was going to Banca del Fucino. Later that day investigators announced that the Vatican Bank’s chairman and director general are under investigation for failure to meet Italy’s anti-money laundering laws. On that day in September, I wrote a blog post about the Institute for Works of Religion, known commonly as Vatican Bank, and its...

Today is International Anti-Corruption Day, established by the United Nations, as a day of awareness for the issue. As the UN describes it: “Attitudes on corruption are changing. As recently as ten years ago, corruption was only whispered about. Today there are signs of growing intolerance toward corruption and more and more politicians and chief executives are being tried and convicted.” The United States has proven itself the world’s trailblazer on matters of anti-corruption. The U.S. flagship anti-corruption legislation is the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which makes it unlawful for persons and entities to “make payments to...

It’s not hard to imagine a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah quickly spiraling into a full-scale regional war. Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Saad Hariri, has already declared that his government would support the Shiite military organization if a new war broke out with Israel. A recent paper authored by Jeffrey White and published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argues that if war were to come to Israel’s northern boarder it would be “transformational” and “fateful.” White argues the participants would fight the war over extensive portions of Lebanon, Israel, and probably Syria, “featuring large...