Most international standards and law enforcement agencies focus their efforts on fighting money laundering by banks and financial institutions. However, several non-financial sectors, such as real estate and luxury goods, are extremely vulnerable to illicit financial flows. Now is the time to clean up the sector and close this loophole for the corrupt.
Topic:
Corruption, Crime, International Trade and Finance, and Reform
For some people national borders constitute an insurmountable barrier. For others, they represent a comfortable way to hide ill-gotten wealth and to escape accountability for their actions. Now is the time to close the legal loopholes that allow corrupt individuals to elude justice for themselves and their money.
Shedding light on who benefits from companies is a key defence for stopping corruption. Such information helps to prevent a safe haven to hide the proceeds of corruption and aids in revealing the money trail behind it.
Gender inequality and corruption are closely inter-linked. Gender inequalities undermine good governance, sustainable growth, development outcomes and poverty alleviation. Where countries have made advances in women's empowerment and gender equality, they have witnessed lower levels of corruption over time.
Sport is a global phenomenon engaging billions of people and generating annual revenues of more than US$ 145 billion. But corruption and challenges to governance threaten to undermine all the good that sport can do and joy that it brings. For Transparency International, tackling the roots of corruption in sports requires coordinated stakeholder actions. This must happen and be driven from within the sports community.
Public sector officials who have achieved positions of power and managerial control over government budgets and spending can be particularly vulnerable to corruption. Asset declarations offer a critical tool to public officials and those they serve in the prevention, detection, investigation and sanctioning of corruption.
Corruption undermines the humanitarian mission that is the raison d'être of humanitarian operations. Relief is delivered in challenging environments, in the midst of conflict and where natural disasters have stretched or overwhelmed national capacities. The injection of large amounts of resources into resource-poor economies where institutions have been damaged or destroyed can exacerbate power asymmetries and increase opportunities for abuse of power. There is often pressure to disburse aid rapidly and immense organisational challenges in suddenly expanding the scope and scale of programme delivery. Commonly, the countries in which the majority of humanitarian aid is delivered already suffer from high levels of perceived corruption prior to an emergency.
The national integrity system of Israel was found to have uneven or "oscillating" levels of integrity: some of the central pillars received a fairly high score, placing them in the top fifth of the evaluation scale, some medium-high scores, whereas some pillars, central to the system, received scores barely above mid-scale. The pillars with the highest integrity, in terms of over-all integrity ranking, can be regarded as pillars that safeguard the democracy in Israel: chief among them is the Central Elections Committee (91), followed by the Judicial Branch (83) and the State Comptroller (81). On the other hand, the analyses indicate that the principle weakness of the Israeli national integrity system lies with the pillars of The Public Sector ±i.e., the Civil Service (52), the Executive Branch (58), and the political parties (60).Conspicuous in its low integrity score was The Executive Branch, i.e., the government, where the indicators of Governance and the Role in the integrity system were particularly low.
<p>This Transparency International report, Transparency in Corporate Reporting: Assessing the Worlds Largest Companies, evaluates the transparency of corporate reporting by the worlds 124 largest publicly listed companies. The report assesses the disclosure practices of companies with respect to their anti-corruption programmes, company holdings and the disclosure of key financial information on a country-by-country basis. It follows on from a 2012 report which focused on the worlds 105 largest publicly traded companies. The report is part of a series of studies based on a similar methodology aimed at assessing the transparency practices of companies, the most recent being a 2013 report on leading emerging market companies./p
<p>This is the tenth annual progress report on OECD Anti-Bribery Convention enforcement by Transparency International, the global coalition against corruption. The OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions, adopted in 1997, requires each signatory country to make foreign bribery a crime for which individuals and enterprises are responsible. The Convention is a key instrument for curbing the export of corruption globally because the 41 signatory countries are responsible for approximately two-thirds of world exports and almost 90 per cent of total foreign direct investment outflows. The OECD Working Group on Bribery, which represents the 41 Parties to the Convention, conducts a follow-up monitoring programme under which 9-10 countries are reviewed each year.</p>