Financial Transparency Coalition

Tom Cardamone, Managing Director of Global Financial Integrity, continues his biweekly series of blog posts with TrustLaw, on efforts to repatriate government funds illicitly transferred overseas by corrupt government officials.  Based on new World Bank and United Nations Office on Drug and Crime data, as well as experiences with past repatriation attempts, he notes “This means, shockingly, that

Global Financial Integrity has been warning about illicit financial flows (IFFs) out of The People's Republic of China for years. These outflows have ranged from an annual US$169 billion in 2000 to US$344 billion in 2008. Dev Kar, Lead Economist for GFI, notes trade mispricing, which is the practice of underpricing exports or overpricing imports in order to shift illegally capital abroad, is “the major channel for the transfer of illicit capital from China.” The country is also, by far, the largest transmitter of illicit financial flows...

In a piece titled Dirty Money: Why does the international banking system make it so easy for corruption to flourish?, the People & Power series on Al Jazeera reports on kleptocrats, grand scale corruption, and the ease of channelling dirty money through the secrecy mechanisms of the global financial system, Again, let's drive the point home here, we're talking secrecy - we are not disputing rights to due privacy - we are talking the kind of secrecy that allows criminals and tax cheats to profit with impunity, and to lead privileged...

‘Give a man a fish’, goes the old saying, ‘and he’ll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he’ll eat forever.’ In its time, this was a progressive message, arguing for sustainable development approaches over simple aid-giving, but it now sounds rather dated. Worse than the apparent gender bias is the underlying assumption that development solutions involve ‘us’ teaching ‘them’ how to avoid being poor. The thrust of Christian Aid’s work on financial integrity, and that of the Task Force and its other members,...