Financial Transparency Coalition

In August 2010, the bodies of 72 immigrants were discovered in Tamaulipas, a state in northeastern Mexico. While nobody knows the sequence of events that led to this massacre, it is well known that Tamaulipas is at the center of a turf war between two powerful drug cartels, the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel. Control of territory and trafficking routes is critical as it enables the cartels to expand their criminal operations to include other moneymaking endeavors like fuel bunkering, prostitution, kidnapping, and even software piracy. Across the Atlantic, a recent report for the Council of Europe...

“Coffee shops” are causing trouble and increasing crime rates in small Dutch towns that border neighboring countries. To some degree it’s drug tourism, visitors coming from other countries to engage in infamous Dutch, legal pastimes. However, these “coffee shops” that sell drugs are also facilitating the expansion of organized crime and of the underground economies both in the Netherlands and in neighboring states. As the underground economy grows, the government’s ability to govern slowly erodes, and the bigger fish become harder to track and catch. While drug tourism is a small problem compared to, for example, a corrupt African official...

FREETOWN – Sierra Leone is closing its international shipping registry to foreign-owned fishing vessels in a move intended to reduce illegal catches in its seas and around the world, the fisheries minister said on Thursday.

Consumer demand for expensive rosewood furniture and musical instruments in China and elsewhere is the primary driver of an ecologically devastating trade in illegal timber, according to an October 2010 report published by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and Global Witness. The report, launched at the 10th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), shows how this ongoing trade has been facilitated by the complicity of some of Madagascar's state authorities and weak law-enforcement by the country's transitional government.