JUSTIN ARENSTEIN, Nelspruit | Wednesday
AFRICAN anti-corruption campaigners have urged the United Nations to draft an international treaty expediting the recovery and repatriation of an estimated $30bn stolen from some of the worlds poorest countries and transferred abroad.
Transparency International said the assets had been misappropriated from some of the world’s poorest countries by corrupt politicians, soldiers, and business people over the past two decades and was being kept abroad in the form of cash, stocks and bonds, real estate and other assets.
TI pointed out that the Nigerian government had managed to recover an estimated US$750m that was illegally appropriated by the Abacha military regime and insisted that it was therefore possible to trace and recover other wealth that had been stolen from national treasuries.
TI representatives said the UN should therefore force transnational banks to open their accounts for inspection in cases of suspected corruption or other illegal activity.
They also call for “the sealing of all known loopholes, requiring banks to open their books for inspection where there is reasonable cause to suspect illegal activity, and mandatory liquidation and repatriation of assets known to have been corruptly acquired”.
The OAU should, as a first step, adopt all reasonable measures to prevent the illegal appropriation and transfer of moneys from Africa’s treasuries, TI said.
The declaration follows TI’s drafting of the groundbreaking Wolfsberg Anti-Money Laundering Principles with 11 major international banks last year in an attempt to develop new ethical business guidelines for international private banks.
The Wolfsberg Principles state that “bank policy will be to prevent the use of its world-wide operations for criminal purposes. The bank will endeavour to accept only those clients whose source of wealth and funds can be reasonably established to be legitimate.”
TI added, however, that national governments were also obliged to strengthen international and national law to provide stringent measures to prevent the money laundering of any kind.
Pointing out that similar laws already existed to combat the international drug trade, TI called on international law enforcement agencies to proactively recover the proceeds of other organised crime involving corrupt officials or politicians. – African Eye News Service