Financial Transparency Coalition

The term of art is "resource curse." Simply put, it's the distressingly common tendency of less developed, impoverished countries to fail to translate mineral wealth into broad prosperity

BIS – the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills – issued a white paper on trade in November. I made a submission yesterday, saying (in slightly edited form, but only with regard to the detail of country-by-country reporting): “I note the above consultation and offer comment here with regard to just one of the issues raised. Questions 23 and 24 ask: 23. What are the key challenges preventing LICs and MICs from benefiting from trade? 24. What are the key constraints preventing trade and investment with LICs and MICs?

SONIA GANDHI, the head of the ruling Congress party, laments that India’s “moral universe” is shrinking, as newspapers fill with ever more galling cases of political corruption.

Take a look at this story in the Guardian, and the associated ActionAid report. As The Guardian summarises it: “The world’s second-largest beer company, SABMiller, is avoiding millions of pounds of tax in India and the African countries where it makes and sells beer by routing profits through a web of tax-haven subsidiaries, according to