Financial Transparency Coalition

WASHINGTON, DC – Global Financial Integrity (GFI) praised G20 leaders today for prominently focusing on the issue of illicit financial flows, committing to move toward the automatic exchange of tax information, and renewing the mandate of the Anti-Corruption Working Group for another two years, but expressed disappointment in the leaders’ failure to address the issue of anonymous shell companies.

In December of 2011, nearly a year after South Sudan voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence from its northern neighbor, I asked a very important question. Will South Sudan defy the resource curse? The “resource curse” is the tragic phenomenon that countries well-endowed with natural resources tend to have slower economic growth and poorer development than those without. According to an analysis of developing countries by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner, the more an economy relies on mineral wealth, the lower its growth rate. Countries with significant natural resource endowments also tend to have an increased likelihood of experiencing war...

  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

In the past decades, corruption, tax loopholes, and ineffective trading regulations have widened the gap between developed and developing countries, shifting trillions of dollars in assets from the world’s poorest countries to the world’s richest through illicit financial flows. This increased division was the direct result of financial globalization, suggesting a moral paradox: as global societies have become more connected in an economic sense, we have grown farther apart in a certain moral sense.