Financial Transparency Coalition

Over the weekend, the New York Times alleged that Wal-Mart deliberately hid investigations into bribery practices at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. Wal-Mart is Mexico’s largest private sector employer with currently 209,000 employees. Allegedly there is a paper trail that includes hundreds of suspect payments worth more 24 million USD in total.

To get to the bottom of corruption, Transparency International analyses a range of critical societal institutions (such as the business, media or political parties) and assesses their ability to prevent corruption. This ‘national integrity system’ assessment has been carried out in more than 70 countries worldwide, with 25 of the studies recently completed or being finalised across Europe. The Greece report finds that several “pillars” of the Greek anti‐corruption system have fundamental flaws, the most significant of which is a crisis of values, typified by broad scale acceptance of and participation in corruption.

On a large scale, corruption undermines development and democracy, exacerbates poverty, erodes civil society, stifles social services, and worsens public health. When it involves cross-boarder flow of money, it is damaging to economies not just because of the underlying corrupt acts, but also because it deprives the country of both public and private resources—including financial capital—that might otherwise be diverted to productive activities. Most of the corruption that we talk about on this blog and in the general dialogue about corruption and economic development—concerns this sort of large-scale corruption. But there is another kind of corruption that is often overlooked:...

The OECD Working Group on Bribery has just adopted its first evaluation report of Russia’s implementation and enforcement of the Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (OECD Anti-Bribery Convention). The Working Group on Bribery notes that some concerns remain in Russia’s legislation for fighting foreign bribery that will need to be further reviewed during Phase 2.