Transparency International ‘Corruption Perception Index’ Fails to address ….. Corruption

By Graham Vanbergen – Last year I reported on Transparency International’s 2015 Corruption Perceptions Index with an article entitled “Latest corruption index does not reveal Britain’s real place in global crime wave.” Nothing has changed.

In essence the report states that the world is mired in corruption and that it is getting worse even after much publicised efforts by embarrassed officials from all over the Western world, attempting to calm the nerves of citizens living with a constant stream of ever greater financial crimes and mass corruption unearthed by whistleblowers who subsequently usually find themselves on-the-run or behind bars or both.

Britain entered the top 10 last year and remains at No10 this year.

TI’s opening paragraph “Over two-thirds of the 176 countries and territories in this year’s index fall below the midpoint of our scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). The global average score is a paltry 43, indicating endemic corruption in a country’s public sector. Top-scoring countries are where citizens face the tangible impact of corruption on a daily basis.”

It is true that Britain does not suffer from overt daily corruption involving the police and judiciary such as bribery and extortion on its streets but frankly that’s about where it ends. Britain is plagued by untrustworthy and badly functioning public institutions such as a political system that fails to; halt mass spying and surveillance now described as the worst in the western world, stop engagement in unpopular wars causing indescribable misery, death and mass migration, regulate a banking industry where corruption is endemic and stopping (as promised) out-of-control corporate lobbying whose primary goal is to destroy public interest legislation purely for profit.

Since 2012, Britain has actually increased its position in the table as becoming less corrupt. And yet we’ve had non-stop scandals and many acts of egregious malfeasance by those in public office and others professing corporate responsibility, supported of course, by a rampantly biased establishment media, most of whom are owned by shady tax exiles.

One such example is of ex-British Ambassador Craig Murray who exposes the “Blanket Corporate Media Corruption” where ‘post-truth’ politics rose its ugly head. Unreported in Britain was the “Systematic ‘fake news’ Planted By Britain’s Intelligence Services” where we find evidence that in some of Britain’s newspapers”more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll.

Tax Justice Network have just reiterated that if Britain and its network of ‘satellite tax havens’ were put together, it would top their Financial Secrecy Index as the biggest threat to global financial transparency.

The European Financial Review prominently published an article “Enemies of the State: How the Financial Services Industry is Destroying Democracy.” The point is made that financial crime, including the funding of large scale international terrorism, the sale of weapons and munitions to despots and dictators, the destabilisation of emerging economies, global drug trafficking operations and gargantuan money laundering facilities embedded in a long list of crimes, are in very large part facilitated by Britain and its army of bankers, accountants and lawyers willing to break all relevant laws for a slice of the action by using its extensive network of tax haven operations.

Russia is listed as 131 from 176 listed countries in TI’s report. It’s placement is probably true but nearly 50 per cent of all of Russia’s wealth is now stored and sheltered offshore, facilitated, again in large part by favoured money launderer of choice – Britain. Oligarchs have acquired British national newspapers, whole stretches of London’s finest residences, shopping malls, building land and of course a seat at the Conservative party ball to influence British politics in their favour. They even fund the Tory party by becoming British citizens, though Britain’s £1m Tier One Investment scheme, thereby dodging banned foreign donation laws – simples!

Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of Vladimir Chernukhin, who was Russia’s deputy finance minister under President Putin in 2000, famously paid £160,000 to play tennis with Cameron and Boris Johnson from via another Tory party cash raising bash. Who pays £160k for a game of tennis, unless of course you are able to personally gain from the encounter?

Staggeringly, it is now known that 30 percent of all African wealth – the majority illegally obtained, is administered and managed by the Western financial services industry and Britain’s involvement is undisputed. It also transpires that 40 percent of funds in the British Virgin Isles is from the People’s Republic of China, a practice banned by the Chinese government.

A recent Global Financial Integrity (GFI) report stated that “Illicit Financial Flows from developing and emerging economies in 2004-2013, lost US$7.8 trillion in illicit financial flows, increasing at an average rate of 6.5 percent per year—more than twice as fast as global GDP.”

Around $1trillion is leaving developing nations each year and entering the West; stolen from African healthcare budgets, HIV/Aids budgets in Russia, China’s Health Standards Board and nations all over the Middle-East. There is now more money illegally leaving Africa each and every year than they receive from the rest of world in aid.

Developing Europe, which includes EU nations such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia, Poland and Romania plus 15 neighbouring nations such as Albania and Armenia account for nearly 26 per cent of illicit financial flows into tax havens and Western banks.

A policy paper written by ThinkTank History&Policy describes the scale of Britain’s involvement in money laundering. “Most of the significant tax havens existing today have developed around two principal geo-political poles. One pole has evolved with close links to the City of London. This includes British Crown dependencies such as the Channel Islands, Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, British Overseas Territories among which the most significant tax havens are the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos and Gibraltar, and recently-independent British Imperial colonies such as Hong Kong, Singapore, the Bahamas, Bahrain and Dubai. Less significant in terms of impact, but more numerous, are newly independent British Pacific territories. The other pole developed in Europe and consists of the Benelux countries – Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg – Ireland, and of course, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.”

Nowhere in the Corruption Perception Index is there a measurement that takes account of mass global money-laundering and facilitation of large scale criminal activity through ‘financial services’ (see methodology pdf). It takes no account of the colossal damage done to emerging nations as a result of aggressive financial lawlessness. It takes no account of the undermining of social democracy across the West due to a lack of desperately needed cash (with trillions siphoned off) that manifests itself as the ideological fiction of austerity causing the rise of inequality, extreme political parties and opportunistic populists.

The actual facilitators of this huge financial fraud are successive government’s refusing to tackle the problem. Even the Queen is implicated as much of this activity is based in her Crown dependencies, many of whom are now blacklisted by the EU. The Police would be overwhelmed (and no doubt leant on) if they even attempted to investigate and the mainstream media do little as they are often using offshore facilities themselves (such as the Guardian).

It should be noted that in the top 20 least corrupt nations, half were involved directly or otherwise in the complete destruction of nearly half of the bottom 20 listed as most corrupt. Indeed, three were wealthy, stable, secular oil producing sovereign nations who threatened no-one, but Iraq, Libya and Syria were bombed into oblivion. These nations are now completely failed states overrun by terrorists and gangs causing a wave of refugees that citizens of the West do not want.

Perhaps it should not be of much a surprise to learn that a significant donor to Berlin based TI is Britain’s Dept for International Development. The DfID has been embroiled in one scandal after another. One such scandal is the DfID giving money to the government of Tanzania, whose officials then siphoned off over $122million facilitated by ‘foreign bankers’ which then found itself in safe offshore tax havens.

Global Witness has just stated that the “DfID currently spends around £150 million [$184 million] in aid contributions [annually] in Democratic Republic of Congo, yet $1.36 billion in mining revenues were lost via British tax havens and London-listed companies.”

TI’s Corruption Perception Index, reporting annually since 1995 tells us nothing more than, the West is Good, the Middle East is bad but really bad if attacked by the West. China is bad but not as bad as Russia. Africa is just as bad as South America but the USA is just a bit naughty, whilst Canada is almost squeaky clean – just like Britain.

 

 

---