Financial Transparency Coalition

Victor Yanukovych lives on 340 acres of land on the banks of the river Dnieper in Ukraine. His home, a five story mansion named Mezhyhiriya, is decorated with marble, crystal, and precious woods. It is difficult to overstate the luxury of this palatial building. Its cedar doors are worth $64,000 each, the wall paneling in

This year saw a great deal of progress on financial transparency. From the G20 Summit in St. Petersburg to 10 Downing Street, the world has committed to more transparency both in words and in actions. Specifically, the events of this year have shown the world is eager to cooperate on issues of transparency and there is significant momentum building for significant and sustainable change. Here’s a review of some of the big events in 2013. Many of the developments in 2013 showed the world is more willing to cooperate on issues of transparency. At its heart, transparency requires cooperation....

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...

The summit between leaders of the world’s wealthiest economies will get underway next week in Northern Ireland. British Prime Minister David Cameron, leading the summit, has put three things at the top of his agenda: trade, tax, and transparency. There are a lot of issues directly relevant to the Financial Transparency Coalition in there, and I don’t have time to address them all, but one of the most promising, and interesting, is Cameron’s commitment to improving information on beneficial ownership of companies via public registries. Anonymity is prevalent under the world’s status quo. It is exceptionally easy (and relatively cheap)...