Global Financial Integrity
WASHINGTON, DC – Global Financial Integrity welcomes Krishen Mehta, as the newest member of its Advisory Board. Mr. Mehta is a U.S. CPA and has been a partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for almost 20 years. From 1994 to 2008 Mr. Mehta worked closely with PwC clients in Japan, South Korea, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, and India.
India’s opposition party leader L.K. Advani sparked a political conflagration with pre-election campaign remarks that India was losing tens of billions of dollars each year in illicit financial outflows, or “black money”. He asserted that the National Democratic Alliance would vigorously pursue recovery of these lost assets if voted into power. With the rolling election now in progress, the issue of India’s missing billions has grown progressively thornier, as both sides vie to take the moral high ground.
Whatever the outcome of the election, India’s problem has broader implications both for the developing world and for efforts by the Group of 20 developed and developing nations to craft an effective post-crisis economic plan for the global financial system.
WASHINGTON, DC – Global Financial Integrity issued a statement today on its 2008 report “Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries: 2002-2006,” in response to growing interest in and citation of the report’s estimates of illicit capital flight out of India, which is ranked fifth out of 160 developing countries analyzed.
Global Financial Integrity
WASHINGTON, DC – The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs is the newest member to join the Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development as a member of the Task Force Partnership Panel, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) announced today.
Global Financial Integrity
Official Statement from GFI
WASHINGTON, DC – This time last year the German government was pursuing a campaign to obtain information on 900 of its citizens whose names appeared on a list of secret accounts at Liechtenstein’s LGT bank. Meanwhile, presidential hopeful and then-Senator Barack Obama was pledging to crackdown on tax havens and tax evaders if elected president. The world economy was still in one piece and the Dow was above 10,000.
Tom Cardamone
Just before tax day, here is a depressing number: $356 billion. That is the Congressional Budget Office’s new calculation for how much the financial bailout will cost taxpayers, nearly twice the prior estimate.
Who won’t be helping foot the TARP bill? Tax evaders – but they might not get away with it for long.
Corinna Gilfillan
Global Financial Integrity
Joint News Release from Global Financial Integrity and Global Witness
WASHINGTON, DC – Every year developing countries lose as much as $1 trillion due to illicit financial practices such as government corruption, tax evasion, and criminal activity. Today’s pledge from the G20 to increase funding for the IMF and for the developing world are laudable, but these efforts must also address illicit capital flight which remains the greatest impediment to economic development and poverty alleviation.
Global Financial Integrity
Not the Beginning of the End but, Perhaps, the End of the Beginning
WASHINGTON, DC – Contrary to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s statement today that provisions in the G20 Communiqué denote the “start of the end” of tax havens, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) believes the Action Plan agreed to in London today “is more likely just the end of the beginning” of the effort to curtail the activities of jurisdictions that hide financial transactions behind a veil of secrecy.
