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GFI Notes Significant Progress on Automatic Information Exchange but Warns that Poorest Countries Are Being Shunned
October 30th, 2014
WASHINGTON, DC – While noting significant progress today in the global effort to curb tax evasion, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) expressed concerns that the OECD/G20 movement toward automatic exchange of financial information was excluding the world’s poorest countries from reaping any benefits while failing to deal with the issue of illicit financial flows in comprehensive manor. 89 countries committed Wednesday to implement automatic exchange of financial information between jurisdictions by the end of 2017 or 2018 at the annual meeting of the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes in Berlin.
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Exposed: Illegal gold, trade mis-invoicing and tax fraud in South Africa
September 26th, 2014
A powerful 20 minute film just out from Carte Blanche, a major South African investigative news programme lifts the lid on the country’s illegal mining sector. The film takes us on a journey where “poor, desperate people” brave gunmen to go underground to look for gold in atrocious conditions. We witness illegal gold trades by a headteacher on his own school grounds during school hours and hear from gold traders making 10 million rand a month (about $900,000). The film shows us the “new randlords” and organised crime syndicates who rake in billions buying black market gold. But the value of this gold...
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US$401.6 Billion Flowed Illegally out of Brazil from 1960 to 2012, Finds New GFI Report
September 8th, 2014
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil / WASHINGTON, DC – More than US$400 billion flowed illegally out of Brazil between 1960 and 2012— draining domestic resources, driving the underground economy, exacerbating inequality, and facilitating crime and corruption—according to a new report to be published Monday, September 8th at a press event in Rio de Janeiro by Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a Washington DC-based research and advocacy organization. Titled “Brazil: Capital Flight, Illicit Flows, and Macroeconomic Crises, 1960-2012,” the study finds that trade misinvoicing—the fraudulent over- and under-invoicing of trade transactions—accounted for the vast majority (92.7 percent) of the country’s illicit financial outflows over the...
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New Standard Chartered Settlement Underscores Insufficiency of Fines & Monitoring in Deterring Illicit Activity at International Banks
August 20th, 2014
GFIWASHINGTON, DC – As New York regulators announced that British bank Standard Chartered PLC will pay a fine of $300 million for failing to rectify anti-money laundering deficiencies as required by the bank’s August 2012 settlement with New York regulators, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) warned that the agreement underscored the fact that fines and monitoring are insufficient for deterring illicit activity at international banks. “As I noted in August 2012 when the original Standard Chartered settlement was first announced, monitoring and paltry fines are not an effective response in this case,”...
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