Financial Transparency Coalition

From the birth of pioneering anti-corruption organization Transparency International in 1993, to the Arab Spring in 2011, this is the story of people who risk their lives (and the many who support them) to combat government-business conspiracies to secure justice, accountability, transparency and integrity. It is the story of an African child denied an education because her parents cannot bribe a school teacher, and of hundreds of thousands of Egyptians who overcame their fears, encouraged by Twitter and Facebook, to demand an end to government abuse.

Over the past six months, various arms of the law in the United States have significantly increased their anti-money laundering enforcement actions. The centerpiece of these actions have been fines to ING, Standard Chartered, and an anticipated forthcoming action against HSBC. Other banks, and even Wal-Mart, could be targeted in the near future as well.

Since the 1999 Duma election, which was widely considered free and fair, Russia has descended from a “Partly Free” society, according to Freedom House’s Freedom in the World Rankings, to “Not Free” this year. In the last six years, Russia has passed a law giving bureaucrats discretion to shut down NGOs; an assassin murdered Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist who was critical of the Kremlin, in cold blood; and the government heavily manipulated the parliamentary elections to give a majority to pro-government parties. Corruption has been an endemic part of Russia’s public and private sectors for decades. Global Financial Integrity...

Corrupt dictators who take bribes and loot their treasuries are rightly condemned by governments and other observers in developed countries. But the extent to which this plundering is aided by lax and weakly enforced money laundering laws in the West has too often escaped notice. It is remarkably easy for these criminals to hide their identities behind anonymous shell companies and bank secrecy in order to bring their dirty money into the United States and Europe.