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Will Britain tackle tax evasion?

317 Pressure on what are alternatively called ‘offshore havens’, ‘tax havens305’ or ‘secrecy jurisdictions’ is reaching an unprecedented level. There are more than fifty such havens world wide, and governments are finally coming around to the idea voiced by activists that tougher regulation is needed. The economic crisis has lent urgency to the cause. Britain’s […]

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Is the Public watching its Public Officials?

We have been posting a series of articles on codes of conduct. Scandals from Brussels to Tbilisi show why it is important that public officials live by a code. Launched in July our blog post series has extolled the benefits and challenges of codes, examined their application in continental and common law countries. Different codes […]

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Transparency comes calling on telecoms, banking sectors

Our recent report on corporate transparency has exposed lamentably low levels of country-by-country reporting across the business spectrum. This means 69 of the world’s biggest companies operate in India, for example, but only two disclose how much money they made there, and not one discloses Indian tax payments on their main corporate website (see the […]

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“F” for aid transparency: Why are development actors not making the grade?

Public information would seem like a pre-requisite if a government is to be managing billions in tax payers’ money. It would even appear more tantamount if this money was destined for the world’s poorest as development financing for schools, clinics, clean water and environmental projects. Yet the world’s aid industry – which totaled nearly US$ […]

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Tackling match fixing needs good governance

On 20 September the European Union released a declaration calling for co-operation between everyone involved in sport to stop match-fixing. Sylvia Schenk, Transparency International’s senior advisor for sport discusses why this is only a first step and what more needs to be done. In the past two years, the world of sport and politics finally […]

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Bribery in Hungary: A Close Encounter of the Third Kind

‘All countries share a responsibility to combat bribery’, according to the OECD anti-bribery convention. But a bribery case in Hungary that has seen action in several other countries, but not Hungary itself, is testing that principle. There is no obstacle stopping British or Swedish law enforcers who investigated the sale of fighter jets to Hungary […]

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Barriers to preventing corruption: what do businesspeople say?

Last week, on 12 September, three former Hewlett-Packard managers were charged in a corruption investigation over improper payments aimed at winning a 35 million euro (US$45 million) computer sales contract in Russia some nine years ago. The former German Hewlett-Packard subsidiary has been charged with bribery, breach of trust and aiding in tax evasion. But […]

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Making Slovak state companies more transparent

318 A new index measures transparency in state-owned companies. Ján Podhorský was appointed to lead Tepláreň Košice, hundred percent state-owned  heating plant, in August 2010, soon after national elections. Podhorský  was one of the hundreds of politically appointed managers who came to lead state companies after the electoral change. Nothing unusual in Slovakia, where two […]

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Brussels waters down Euro-Parliament Code of Conduct

In the European Parliament the issue of codes of conduct is a hot topic at the moment. As one Member of the European Parliament recently stated on facebook, “What my employment was before I was elected, is not of the European Parliament or your business.”  Unfortunately, it seems that some members of the European Parliament (MEPs) […]

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Better anti-corruption reporting but is it credible?

Scandals such as the revelations of banks misleading regulators on LIBOR are further eroding people’s trust in companies. Two in three Europeans, for example, believe that corruption is part of their country’s business culture. One of steps for companies to restore trust is by publicly reporting on their anti-bribery measures. Once a company has done […]

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