Dirty money keeps flowing
Global Witness’s report, Undue Diligence: How banks do business with corrupt regimes, presents evidence that:
- Barclays kept open an account for the son of the dictator of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea long after clear evidence emerged that his family were heavily involved in substantial looting of state oil revenues.
- A British tax haven and a Hong Kong bank helped the son of the president of Republic of Congo, another oil-rich African country, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of his country’s oil revenues on designer shopping sprees.
- Citibank facilitated the funding of two vicious civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia by enabling the warlord Charles Taylor, now on trial for war crimes in the Hague, to loot timber revenues.
- HSBC and Banco Santander hid behind bank secrecy laws in Luxembourg and Spain to frustrate US efforts to find out if Equatorial Guinea’s oil revenues had been looted and laundered.
- Deutsche Bank assisted the late president Niyazov of Turkmenistan, a notorious human rights abuser, to keep billions of dollars of state gas revenues under his personal control and off the national budget.
- Dozens of British, European and Chinese banks have provided Angola’s opaque national oil company, Sonangol, with billions of dollars of oil backed loans, though there is no transparency or democratic oversight about how these advances on the country’s oil revenues are used, and they have a recent history mired in corruption and secret arms deals. (from Major Banks Supporting Corrupt Regimes)
This is not a new story and it will keep on going on for a good while yet. But hopefully with governments looking into the doings of the banks after the financial collapse will also have some impact on these disgusting practices.
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