The cellphones were infected with porn. Then the Panama Papers exposed a bribery scheme, this company says (Miami Herald)
March 20, 2017“The Panama Papers highlight how easy it is for criminals and fraudsters to manipulate the global financial system and use the secrecy afforded by these anonymous companies to benefit from their ill-gotten gains,” Shah said. “The whole concept behind a shell company is you cannot figure out who ultimately controls the company or who is deriving economic benefits from it.” Read more
One of the US’s greatest gifts to the global economy is under threat from Trump (Quartz)
March 13, 2017The role of the SEC is to instill internal controls on corruption within companies and ensure their accounting isn’t hiding bribery. It can also force them to turn over any profits made from corruption, sometimes worth hundreds of millions of dollars. If and when Clayton is confirmed, Shruti Shah, vice president at Transparency International USA, says she worries he could start putting resources and personnel into different departments. “That would send all the wrong signals” to companies, she said. Read more
Jan 31, 2017 – Letter on Cardin-Lugar 1504 Anti-Corruption Provision
February 8, 2017TI-USA joined several other civil society organizations in sending a letter to Speaker Ryan, Minority Leader Pelosi, Chairman Hensarling and Ranking Member Waters urging them to support the Cardin-Lugar Anti-Corruption rule and vote no on H.J. Resolution 41. Read more
No, The System’s Not Totally Rigged. But That Idea Sure Helped Donald Trump (Huffington Post)
December 18, 2016Transparency International, a group that tracks corruption worldwide, ranks the United States 16th among 168 nations ― on par with other Western, industrialized nations and considerably better than China (83rd), Mexico (95th) and Russia (119th), countries mentioned favorably by Trump during the campaign. “The U.S. doesn’t really do terribly,” said Shruti Shah. Read more
Shah and Heywood: FATF report finds U.S. weak on transparency of beneficial ownership (FCPA Blog)
December 5, 2016The new report on the United States by the global anti-money laundering body known as the Financial Action Task Force or FATF has a number of positive findings. However, the report finds significant weaknesses, with the most important being related to gaps in access to information on the ultimate owners of companies (beneficial owners). Read more
Malaysians worry Trump will drop a corruption investigation into his “favorite prime minister” (Quartz)
December 1, 2016Malaysia’s prime minister Najib Razak may have hundreds of thousands of his countrymen calling for his resignation—embroiled as he is in a multi-billion-dollar corruption case—but he has one thing to be grateful for: His onetime golfing partner is the next president of the United States, whose justice department happens to be pursuing that very same corruption case.
Of course, just because Trump will be president doesn’t mean he can simply order an ongoing case to be dropped. “The justice department enjoys a level of independence, even though the attorney general is appointed by, and reports to, the president,” said Shruti Shah, vice president of programs and operations at Transparency International in Washington, DC. Read more
We can start taking Trump seriously about ditching his business interests when he does these five things (Quartz)
November 30, 2016Even if Trump has the best of intentions, he will need to go beyond the bare-minimum legal and ethical standards to win over the skeptics.
“We really want to start this administration on a good footing, so that every time he makes a decision, every time he speaks to a foreign leader, every time he has a meeting people are not wondering whether he is putting his interest before the interests of the American people,” says Shruti Shah, vice president of Transparency International, a global anti-corruption NGO. Read more
Days after Trump spoke to Argentina’s president his stalled Buenos Aires tower project picked up steam (Quartz)
November 22, 2016TI-USA’s Shah: President-elect Trump has been elected on the basis of ending the cronyism that exists in Washington, so he has to set a very high standard for himself—so that everybody, including the American people, feels that neither he, nor his businesses, nor his family are getting any preferential treatment.” Read more
Trump says law is on his side amid calls for him to distance from his business empire (McClatchy DC Bureau)
November 22, 2016Transparency International, which fights corruption globally, is adding its name to those calling on President-elect Donald Trump to divest himself of his businesses before he takes office, to avoid any conflicts of interest.
“The president-elect has an early and excellent opportunity to make good on his campaign promise to run a government that works for the people and not for the political class,” said Claudia Dumas, the president of Transparency International-USA.“It’s unprecedented in U.S. history for there to be a president with a global business empire, which is why we felt compelled to issue these recommendations,” said Shruti Shah, vice president of programs and operations. She noted there have been other world leaders with business conflicts “at the highest level” that ended poorly, including Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. Read more