Financial Transparency Coalition

This morning, Larry Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary under President Clinton and former top economic advisor to President Obama, wrote that European austerity is holding back economic growth, which is making their sovereign debt problem worse, both in individual countries passing austerity budgets and on a continent-wide basis.

In my short time here with the Task Force, I've learned that shell corporations show up around every corner when trying to fix problems in the developed and developing world alike. This was proven true again last night, when I attended an event sponsored by Task Force member Global Witness. The event was to present their new report, Dealing With Disclosure: Improving Transparency in Decision-Making Over Large-Sale Land Acquisitions, Allocations, and Investments.

While the year-long allegations of misconduct against the Alstom Group (ALO) have led to some significant consequences for the company – US$9.5 million worth of them – a lot of questions about what happened remain. At the end of February, the World Bank decided to debar two Alstom subsidiaries for three years and agreed on a Negotiated Resolution Agreement worth US$9.5 million in restitution payments with respect to its conduct in Zambia. However, because of the nature of the settlement, the company has not had to publicly disclose the nature and scope of the alleged activities. There is currently a...

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog post criticizing the philosophies of Dan Mitchell, a libertarian scholar from the Cato Institute. I asked for a “thoughtful discussion” and I got it—both from the comments section of our blog and from Dan himself. On his own blog, Dan replied with a thought-provoking point-by-point critique of my piece. Dan made several interesting points in his rebuttal. As much as I’d like to take on the whole post right now, my reply would be far too long and I don’t think our readers would appreciate a blog post that resembles...