Financial Transparency Coalition

Léonce Ndikumana, a member of the Task Force Economist Advisory Council, appeared on The Real News to discuss his new research on capital flight from Africa. His work found that $1.6 trillion in capital flight and odious debt have left Africa from 1970-2010. Of that sum, he found that at least $619 billion had gone missing, and was illicit. Much of this, he argues, was facilitated by big western banks, tax havens, and other Western financial structures.

Global Financial Integrity's new report, Illicit Financial Flows from China and the Role of Trade Misinvoicing, was released yesterday. It found that China lost $3.79 trillion--an astonishingly high number--between 2000 and 2011 to illicit financial flows. In just 2011, China lost almost $600 billion. These outflows are the proceeds of crime, corruption, and tax evasion, and threaten Chinese social stability. The report first debuted exclusively in this week's issue of The Economist.

  Attiyah Waris, Tax Law Professor at Nairobi University, argues that tax evasion strategies used by African multinational corporations drain the continent of revenues that would more than sufficiently finance the African continent.   Foreign Aid would be rendered unnecessary if Africa were to receive tax revenues that are rightfully theirs. The video demonstrates a good

Too often, borrowed monies are salted away from Africa’s most impoverished nations to offshore banks through inflated contracts or kickbacks. The complexities and bank-secrecy laws of the international finance system, combined with a lack of enforcement, assist such transfers, contend James K. Boyce and Léonce Ndikumana, authors of Africa’s Odious Debts: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent. They point to a correlation between foreign borrowing and capital flight: “For every dollar of foreign borrowing in sub-Saharan Africa, on average more than 50 cents leaves the borrower country in the same year.” Capital flight from sub-Saharan Africa...