Financial Transparency Coalition

From hundreds of diplomatic cables, Afghanistan emerges as a looking-glass land where bribery, extortion and embezzlement are the norm and the honest official is a distinct outlier.

In 2004 while in a Comparative Politics class, I had a conversation with a friend, who was relatively well-versed in things political, about Freedom House’s Freedom in the World rankings. I remember referring the fact that Russia was considered a “transitional democracy” and he corrected me. “No,” he replied, “Russia is a democracy.” My friend was wrong, of course, but in retrospect that seems much more obvious than it did at the time. In 2004 Russia, with the ranking “Partly Free,” had only just begun its descent into authoritarianism under the direction of Vladamir Putin. It was that...

A recent report from ActionAid made headlines when it accused SABMiller, the world’s second largest beer company, of avoiding millions of pounds worth of tax in India and the African countries in which it operates. ActionAid argues that through financial transactions with subsidiaries located in tax havens, SABMiller shifts its profits largely via royalty and management fees to firms in developed countries with lower tax rates. As a result, lower local profits mean less taxable income, and that denies governments the revenue needed to build key infrastructures such as schools, roads, and ports. On the other hand, Zahid...

IN INDIA, not only the economy is booming; so, it appears, is graft.