Hackers use technology to fight corruption

Watch out! Internet connections worldwide might be slower this weekend! This weekend hundreds of hackers, programmers, designers and anti-corruption experts and activists in Bogotá, Budapest, Casablanca, Jakarta, Moscow and Vilnius will come together this weekend to develop new ICT tools that can help citizens monitor government and report corruption. Websites like ipaidabribe.com in India and […]

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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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Corporate whistleblowers gain new rights and opportunities in the US

Largely under the public radar, the last decade has seen a legal revolution in the United States in the area of corporate freedom of speech. Although a hodgepodge of 57 laws protecting corporate and government whistleblowers remains, 11 private sector laws passed since the turn of the millennium have established consistent principles for a modern […]

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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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Big banks: Where does the buck stop?

After four years of economic crisis and financial scandal, finally some good news. Eighty-five per cent of bank employees surveyed believe that their companies have an ethical duty to fight corruption. That is a finding from our survey of 3,000 businesspeople in 30 countries: Putting Corruption out of Business (see what businesspeople from other sectors […]

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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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Financial Times joins chorus for more transparency at the ECB

We at TI-EU have been questioning the levels of transparency and accountability at the ECB, as you can see in our op-ed in the EU Observer and our blog post on President Barroso’s address . We are glad to see that those wise old heads at the Financial Times (motto: “without fear or favour”) came to the same conclusion. They, like […]

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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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