Financial Transparency Coalition

On October 29th, Global Financial Integrity will host the book launch for: Global Corruption: Money, Power and Ethics in the Modern World by Laurence Cockcroft.

The G20, as anyone who is familiar with the slow moving tendencies of international organizations will attest to, has taken quite awhile to get behind the idea of cracking down on tax havens and fighting illicit financial flows from both developed and developing countries. The G20 initially recognized these issues as a problem for the internet national community to do something them in early 2009, but it took a slow evolution of statements over the three years for that recognition to be fully fleshed out into concrete actions and orders.

Since 1979, but particularly after the invasion of Iran by Iraq, the United States has imposed sanctions against Iran. Whether or not those sanctions are justified or sufficient is not up for discussion, but rather the integrity of American laws and decisions is. Standard Chartered, ING, and HSBC have been circumventing American laws and foreign policy decisions through their lack of transparency and the deliberate lapse of any and all anti-money laundering systems. Although it is normal to automatically place the blame on the banks, perhaps the blame needs to be distributed in a more representative manner. It is true...

TJN today publishes new research into banks’ and Big 4 accounting firms’ global geographical reach and presence. Using data from our Financial Secrecy Index (FSI) project, our research finds a positive correlation between the number of banks and the Big 4 firms of accountants in a jurisdiction, on the one hand, and the jurisdiction’s degree