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Bangladesh: citizens doubt performance of politicians

A new survey on the performance of MPs by Transparency International Bangladesh is creating a media storm nationally and elsewhere. Since we released it at the start of the week, there have been hundreds of news stories, dozens of newspaper editorials and more than 20 hours of talk shows on nearly all our TV channels, […]

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Corrupción e inseguridad en Centroamérica: Sin transparencia no habrá soluciones

Armas que ingresan sin registro al país, pistas de aterrizaje clandestinas, cargamentos de gran dimensión que entran y salen por las fronteras y que nadie detecta, edificios nuevos deshabitados, balas que se intercambian entre bandas rivales, violación de leyes por las que nadie paga. Estas son manifestaciones del crimen que lamentablemente suceden día a día […]

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Corruption and insecurity in Central America: There are no solutions without transparency

Arms trafficking; clandestine landing runways; large cargos that cross borders and are not detected; empty new buildings; bullets shot between rival gangs; impunity when violating the law. These suspicious activities and crimes occur in Latin America on a daily basis, and are even more virulent in Central America. Criminal activities make the lives of Central […]

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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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The Good Tattler: Lessons in Whistleblowing – from the Lunchroom to the Boardroom

The Financial Times recently reported on the travails of eight British whistleblowers who exposed wrongdoing through clandestine photocopying operations and other desperate measures. This is a global problem. Whistleblowers are still seen as “snitches,” “traitors” and “informants”, particularly in former Communist countries, according to our 2009 report on whistleblowing laws in Europe. These negative attitudes […]

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Prison Abuse Protests: Georgia’s Abu Ghraib

On September 18 Georgian opposition television stations warned their evening audiences that they were about to broadcast disturbing images of abuse by wardens at Gldani prison Nr. 8 in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital city. Many viewers were nevertheless unprepared for what they saw next. One video contained graphic images of prison inmates being sodomized by guards […]

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TI Portugal Summer School: A lesson on integrity

You might have seen Portugal on the news recently. Just over a week ago, an estimated million people (in a country of roughly 10 million) took to the streets protesting new austerity measures announced by Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho. Talk of instability in the governing coalition amid increased public anger damaged the country’s reputation […]

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On the frontline against corruption in Europe

Last Friday, Cobus de Swardt, Managing Director of the global Transparency International Secretariat in Berlin, was visiting Brussels for an interview in the Euronews show “On the Frontline” (OTFL) for a special edition titled “Is there a corruption crisis in Europe?” which aired yesterday. The discussions around this show started already back in August when OTFL […]

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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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