Financial Transparency Coalition

There is just a week to go before the start of the Hidden Money, Hidden Resources conference in Lima, organized by the Financial Transparency Coalition and Latindadd, and the agenda covers a number of topics which are highly relevant to the Americas. The panel I´ve been invited to moderate, for example, will be exploring the links between citizen security, organized crime, corruption and money-laundering. Latin America and the Caribbean as a region has the highest levels of citizen insecurity in the world, and is the only region where criminal violence increased between 2000 and 2010 according to UNDP.

Tomorrow, Heather Lowe of FTC member organization Global Financial Integrity will participate in a panel discussion organized by the U.S. Department of State. The event, hosted at the OpenGov Hub in Washington D.C., will also include officials from the World Bank's Stolen Assets Recovery Initiative, the State Department, and Transparency International USA. The discussion will focus on the inherent links between governance and corruption, and how to combat them. If you aren't based in Washington, or are unable to attend the event, there's no need to worry, as a live stream will be available on the Internet. You can submit questions...

The U.S. Treasury is in the process of taking a big step toward making it harder for corrupt politicians, drug traffickers and terrorists to make use of the U.S. financial system, by forcing banks to know who their customers actually are. This is something we have been advocating for five years. Treasury recently released a proposed rule and is seeking comment until October 3, 2014. There’s info on how to do that here. It’s worth explaining precisely what we think the problem is, and what the rule should look like if it is...

Last November, a former special agent for the Treasury Department, John Cassara, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times with the headline “Delaware, Den of Thieves?” Cassara described how the state of Delaware (along with Wyoming and Nevada) has become “nearly synonymous with underground financing, tax evasion and other bad deeds facilitated by anonymous shell companies”. He told of his frustration as a law enforcement officer trying to get information out of Delaware about the real owners and controllers of companies registered in the state. This week, a debate has started in Delaware about...