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Un paso prometedor en Costa Rica: ahora comienza el verdadero desafío

Un día jueves a finales de Agosto, los ciudadanos costarricenses encendieron sus televisores, radios y aparatos móviles para escuchar las palabras de Luis Guillermo Solís – el recientemente electo Presidente de Costa Rica – acerca de los primeros 100 días de su administración. El discurso y el informe presentados dibujaron un panorama altamente crítico del […]

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Working together to stop fake agricultural products in Uganda

Last month Emmanuel was in despair. His entire crop of maize had perished after he used a fertiliser product he now realised was fake. What could he do now that he and his family of six had nothing left to live on? In Uganda, the sale of counterfeit agricultural inputs is a problem that affects […]

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Piketty: Diagnosing inequality and prescribing a dose of anti-corruption

It’s the blockbuster policy book of the year: Thomas Piketty’s weighty Capital in the 21st Century, a 600 plus-page analysis of the scale and perils of rising inequality. As Piketty argues, wealth and return on capital are growing faster than the overall economy and income from labour. Making matters worse, labour income is becoming increasingly […]

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Do settlements for corporate financial malfeasance work?

This week Standard Chartered Bank reached a second settlement with regulators in New York for failing to monitor suspicious financial transactions. It had also promised to tighten up its anti-money laundering processes when it admitted violating US banking rules on transactions with countries under sanction including Sudan and Iran. Perhaps it didn’t get the message. […]

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Beefing up anti-corruption programmes for corporates

Our chapter in the US recently released a report to help companies assess the effectiveness of their anti-corruption programmes. In this interview, Shruti Shah, our Senior Policy Director at Transparency International-USA, explains why the mere adoption of an anti-corruption programme is not enough – verification is crucial. (This is a shortened version of the interview […]

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Messi and the International Impunity System

The ongoing prosecution of football super star Lionel Messi for alleged tax evasion made global headlines last week. Messi and his father Jorge are accused of evading 4.2 million euros (US$5.6m) in tax on sponsorship earnings in court documents submitted by the prosecutor. The alleged tax evasion scheme was based on using a web of […]

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Learning to lead the fight against corruption

Last week many of us experienced strong emotions in a very short space of time in Vilnius, Lithuania. A group of people from different countries and backgrounds joined the Transparency International School on Integrity with a common commitment to make a change in society by combating corruption. I would like to share my own experience: […]

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World Cup winners and losers

The 2014 World Cup had it all. Goals galore on the pitch, surprise results, tears and triumphs: a cornucopia of sporting excitement for a worldwide audience of more than a billion, culminating in a deserved win for an exceptional team from Germany. But it also had a series of own goals off the pitch by […]

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G20 anti-corruption meeting: progress, but without ambition

The G20 is making progress in the fight against corruption. However for all the talk, the representatives of the world’s leading economies are not setting the bar high enough. From our point of view, unless the G20 mandates and enforces greater corporate transparency, corrupt public officials, gangsters, drug dealers and terrorists will continue to misuse […]

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How the G20 could unmask the corrupt

The G20 leaders meet in Australia later this year. Pressure is growing on them to build on the commitments from last June’s G8 Summit on beneficial ownership. That’s an obscure phrase for an ugly truth: corrupt individuals from around the world are able to hide their money through complex corporate and trust structures, such that when an […]

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