Tag Archives | featured

What’s next for Ukraine?

Ukraine said it planned to confiscate $290 million of assets believed to be stolen through corruption in 2016. So far they’ve recovered and returned to state budget just $5,683. While that’s a tiny improvement from $3,813 recovered last year, it shows the struggling country has a long way to go before it can successfully recover […]

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Cleaning up sport: conflicts of interest at the top

The tension between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has never been greater than this year, when WADA recommended a ban on all Russian athletes from participating in the Rio Olympic Games, only to have the IOC reject that position. This points to a fundamental challenge for the relationship between […]

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In spite of the political whirlwind, climate change is no less real

Last week the world changed with the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. In Marrakesh this week the first Meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA1) had intended to consolidate commitments to keep global temperature rise below 2o Celsius and limit it even further to 1.5o. Instead, the spectre […]

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Stiglitz and Pieth Panama Papers report: a roadmap for global transparency in the 21st century

After resigning from Panama’s official effort to clean up its financial sector, Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and transparency expert Mark Pieth have come out with their own independent report. And it’s a good one. Overcoming the Shadow Economy moves the focus away from Panama itself, to tackle the global problem of secrecy and its […]

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Haiti: disaster prone and ill-equipped to fight corruption

  When Hurricane Matthew hit Haiti on 5 October, the fields where crops were grown were washed away; houses were flattened like cardboard boxes and hundreds of people were killed. The number of dead is now close to 1000 and cholera is once again a fatal danger on our shores. UNICEF says more than 600,000 […]

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Images of Toronto, Singapore and Vienna

Why are three of the world’s richest countries doing so little to stop corruption?

One of the best-known data points in the anti-corruption field is the estimate from Global Financial Integrity that US$ 1.1 trillion in proceeds of corruption, crime and tax evasion are taken from developing countries every year and invested in Western banks, real estate, and luxury goods.  The volume of illicit financial flows is higher than […]

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Benin’s fight against corruption is only beginning

The Republic of Benin is one of West Africa’s most stable countries. Sandwiched between Nigeria and Togo to the east and west, with Niger and Burkino Faso to the north, Benin has a population of about 10 million, 40 per cent of which lives below the poverty line. It gained independence from France in 1960 […]

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What are the candidates hiding?

A September 21 Gallup survey concluded that, “At no point in the last four decades have Americans expressed less trust than they do today in US political leaders or in the American people who voted those leaders into office.” Indeed, only 42 per cent of Americans trust their political leaders and just 56 per cent […]

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Anti-corruption and happiness go hand in hand

There is a clear link between the level of corruption in a country and people’s attitude to corruption. If you shrug your shoulders and accept there’s little to be done, corruption remains high and you are unhappy. If corruption makes you angry and you do something constructive about it, like pass laws and prosecute the […]

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Does Ukraine merit a new handout?

Yesterday the International Monetary Fund approved a further bailout of more than US$1 billion for Ukraine, a country trying to deal with an aggressive eastern neighbour and a ruling elite compromised by corruption. If the decision to resume payments was based on the normal loan conditions, the outcome would have been an obvious no. Ukrainian […]

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