Financial Transparency Coalition

The offshore industry is contentious. There are quite a few passionate accusations and just as many defensive rebuffs. There’s a lot of chatter about which centers are gaining (apparently Hong Kong is on the rise) and which ones are losing (are depositors pulling out of Switzerland in reaction to the UBS scandal?). What this dialogue lacks, however, is comprehensive, accurate, and publicly available data. That’s about to change.

If you’ve read any of my blog posts, you know a thing or two about illicit financial flows, development, and tax havens. I’ve told you about how developing countries lose US$1 trillion a year to illicit financial flows, which is more than what the developing world spends on health care and 500 times what the World Bank spends on emergency food aid. I’ve shown how banking secrecy feeds into the problem of corruption, as dictators like Teodoro Obiang are able to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from their people and then are able to hide it in American...

Moldova is led by the Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova (PCRM), which has dominated the nation since the parliamentary election of 2001. Moldova, a former part of the USSR, established independence in 1991 and was accepted into the United Nations in 1992. In that year, Moldova introduced market reforms, which included price liberalization, though the political leadership left in place many communist policies, remnant from the USSR. The result was an inflation rate of 2,600% and severe economic conditions that, between 1992 and 2001, left much of the population of Moldova below the...

Mali, a landlocked state in West Africa, is a flawed democracy, which established multiparty politics in 1992, but has suffered under military and one-party rule for decades. On the Economists Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, Mali ranks 83rd with a score of 5.87, above the region’s average of 4.28. Recently, however, Mali has been given many reasons to hope for political and economic progress. The current president, Amadou Toumani Touré, nicknamed “The Soldier of Democracy,” has ruled the country since 2002. In 2007 Touré won an easy reelection with 71% of the vote; the election was...