Financial Transparency Coalition

LONDON – Christian Aid has welcomed a new from the World Bank for countries to exchange information about who really owns companies, bank accounts and other financial assets within their borders, in a bid to help recover the billions currently stolen from poor countries each year.

Recently The European Commission published a report entitled “Transfer pricing and developing countries,” which is meant to assist these countries with addressing the problem. Transfer pricing is the single biggest source of illicit financial flows in the world costing developing countries hundreds of billions of dollars every year. While an assessment of the impact of transfer pricing in developing countries is sorely needed the report was narrowly focussed on the implementation and interpretation of the arms length principle. The arm’s length principle, promoted by the OECD that has proven to be very difficult to implement globally...

China has had problems with bribery, corruption, and illicit financial flows for years. In fact illicit outflows from the People’s Republic of Chinahave ranged from an annual US$169 billion in 2000 to US$344 billion in 2008. The country is also, by far, the largest transmitter of illicit financial flows in the developing world. And in case it’s not already obvious, let me clarify that these numbers are unbelievably large. For a point of comparison, the PRC’s stock of total external debt in 2008 was $378 billion, just slightly greater than its total illicit outflows in that year alone. Corruption also...

Nearly 5 years ago the international community, led by the United States, imposed the first in a line of increasingly harsh economic sanctions on Iran in the hopes of ending the country’s nuclear ambitions. Despite some signs of success, consensus on the effectiveness of the sanctions remains elusive. However, what is becoming clear is that sanctions are contributing to an explosion of corruption and funneling billions of dollars to Iran’s fastest growing group of kleptocrats: the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, is like an amalgam of the Iranian CIA, Marines, Mafia and Fortune 500....