Financial Transparency Coalition

Hundreds of billions that could have been used for poverty alleviation and economic development lost, finds new report from Global Financial Integrity

WASHINGTON, DC -- Africa lost $854 billion in illicit financial outflows from 1970 through 2008, according to a new report to be released today from Global Financial Integrity (GFI). Illicit Financial Flows from Africa: Hidden Resource for Development debuts new estimates for volume and patterns of illicit financial outflows from Africa, building upon GFI’s ground-breaking 2009 report, Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries: 2002-2006, which estimated that developing countries were losing as much as...

GFI released the following statement today announcing the "New Haven Declaration," a partnership between human rights and financial transparency advocacy organizations:

GFI Releases "New Haven Declaration" as a Step Forward in the Fight For Human Rights

Washington, DC — Global Financial Integrity (GFI) released today a statement-dubbed the New Haven Declaration-which debuts a new partnership between humans rights and financial transparency advocacy groups. Today's announcement follows a meeting of prominent human rights and financial transparency organizations at Yale University in early December, 2009. The groups discussed the link between illicit financial practices, secrecy in...

On May 4, the Obama administration announced a plan to crack down on offshore tax havens, which it said are costing the United States tens of billions of dollars each year. The President’s proposals were primarily aimed at finding ways to increase revenue from wealthy companies and investors who use loopholes in the law and offshore subsidiaries to reduce their US taxes. But the administration is largely missing a far more devastating problem related to offshore finance: money gained from criminal and other illicit sources. With the use of tax havens and other elements of an increasingly complex “shadow”...

GFI has been known to repeat (and then repeat again) that for every $1 of aid that enters the developing world through the front door, $10 escapes out the back in illicit financial flows (for my explanation of these flows and their the magnitude, see: 10 times ODA, but what is that in Apple Pies?). While many people grasp the enormity of this number, few seem to appreciate what this means or how these flows can affect development. Some people even go so far as to say, “Why should we care? That money wasn’t going...