Financial Transparency Coalition

Who is Mina Corp and why is the U.S. government doing business with it? Last week Andrew Higgins and Walter Pincus at the Washington Post wrote an article highlighting the U.S. military’s connection with this fairly mysterious company. The Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating the contracts awarded to Mina Corp and its associated form Red Star Enterprises and is expected to publish a report on its findings sometime this month. While we wait for the report from Congressional investigators,...

Leaders from the world's largest economies - the G20 - will meet tomorrow and Friday in Seoul, South Korea to discuss the future of our international financial system. They have an unprecedented opportunity to institute changes to create a transparent global financial system that is open, accountable, fair and beneficial for all. As you probably know, developing countries are losing $1 trillion every year due to crime, government corruption, and tax evasion. These illicit monetary outflows are roughly ten times the amount of aid money going into developing countries for poverty alleviation and economic development. Click...

The first paper in Christian Aid’s tax briefing paper series, Accounting for Change, “Shifting Sands: Tax Transparency and Multinational Companies” charts the progress of the campaign for country by country reporting over the past two years, outlines the rationale for such a standard within the development finance debate, presents a private sector perspective (based on Christian Aid’s dialogue with companies and FTSE100 survey), and answers some of the counter arguments.

The issue of stolen assets and their management, or lack of adequate management, by the global financial system is a component of the broader issue of illicit money and how it flows through the financial system to be transformed into licit, “usable” money. This physical process, often referred to as money laundering – a sort of modern alchemy, it is important for anyone to understand who is genuinely concerned with the fight against political or business corruption. In order to be successful at fighting corrupt practices, we need to know what these practices are and which ones work and which...