Financial Transparency Coalition

Nuance can be a challenge for Financial Transparency Coalition issues. To the average citizen or politician, the relationship between banking laws in developed countries and poverty in developing countries is not self-evident. On its face, it’s not obvious that public registries in the United Kingdom have anything to do with corruption in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yet there are compelling connections between these issues and strong causal relationships between them. Our challenge is to explain why. At the risk of sounding too self-congratulatory, I must say the group of organizations who work on these issues does a phenomenal...

A shell game is a well-known parlor game in which players try to follow the movement of a ball placed under one of three quickly shuffled shells or cups and then try to correctly guess the shell that covers the ball once they are brought to rest. When the operator of the game is especially skilled, correctly tracking the ball can prove quite difficult. If a skilled and dishonest operator uses sleight of hand to covertly move the ball to one of the shells not identified by a player, the game becomes impossible to win, a veritable “confidence trick used...

With less than 1,000 days to go until the deadline of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), ONE’s flagship DATA Report has a special focus in 2013, tracking how developing countries are progressing on these ambitious targets using the ‘MDG Progress Index’. The 2013 DATA Report: Financing the Fight for Africa’s Transformation also measures how sub-Saharan African governments are faring against their own spending commitments in three poverty-busting sectors: health, agriculture and education. Finally, it offers recommendations for how the global community can intensify its efforts in a sprint to the MDG finish line.

Phantom Firms are what enabled Teodorin Obiang, the son of the President of Equatorial Guinea, to launder more than $100 million into the USA. This financed a playboy lifestyle of fast cars, a $30 million mansion, a $38.5 million gulfstream jet, and various pieces of Michael Jackson memorabilia, including a diamond-encrusted glove from the Bad Tour. Meanwhile, back home in the oil-rich west African state, more than 1 in 7 children under the age of five were dying from a preventable disease.