Financial Transparency Coalition

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...

Krishen Mehta, co-chair of Global Financial Integrity, wrote an Op-Ed in the Dallas Morning News this week.

Last month, Transparency International released a study (via Corruption Currents) citing how Romania is susceptible to corruption. These conditions create a potential breeding ground for corruption that could not only adversely affect the Romanian Government, but the European Union as well. They focused on four major issues:

Last week, Global Financial Integrity released its annual country-specific report on the drivers and dynamics of illicit financial flows. This year, GFI examined Mexico. GFI defines illicit financial flows as “cross-border movement of money that is illegally earned, transferred, or utilized… the transfer of money earned through illegal activities.” These activities can include corruption, transactions involving contraband goods, criminal activities, and tax evasion.