Anti-Corruption • Ethics & Integrity
Frank has been engaged with global economics, banking, governance and anti-corruption for more than 40 years, as a journalist, as a World Bank senior official, as an anti-corruption civil society leader, and as a top level advisor to financial institutions. Frank is President of Vogl Communications, Inc., which has provided advice to leaders of international finance for more than two decades.
Has the brilliance of the Arab Spring been quashed by the horrors of an Arab Winter, as evidenced by the murder of US Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi, Libya, the coming to power of the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt, the rising prominence in Tunisia and beyond of the radical Salafis, and the brutality of the Syrian regime?
Read MoreWASHINGTON — In 2000, I had the privilege to present Lasantha Wickramatunga, from Sri Lanka, with the Transparency International annual Integrity Award. Wickramatunga was a prominent and tenacious newspaperman with the courage to ask tough questions, call for government accountability and expose corruption. On Jan. 8, 2009, he was driving to work when eight unidentified gunmen on motorcycles shot him in the head, the BBC reported. He died soon afterward. He was 52.
Read Moreresident Obama's major speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 25, 2012, will be a powerful inspiration to civil society activists across the world who are fighting for democracy, an end to human rights abuse, for press freedom, for justice, and against corruption.
Read MoreOver the last decade the World Bank has taken a bold lead among international development institutions in championing the anti-corruption cause. The rhetoric of World Bank leaders, starting with President James Wolfensohn in the late 1990s, in support of good governance has been at a high level – in tone, in consistency and in substance.
Read MoreThe Financial Times - Op Ed
Read MoreSpeaking to the Republican Party Convention, Mitt Romney said, “a free world is a more peaceful world.” He provided no explanation. In fact, there is a lot of evidence to support his assertion.
Where there is scant freedom, there is also abundant violence and rampant governmental corruption. Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, consistently trail in the global rankings of freedom by Freedom House, of perceived corruption by Transparency International, and in the Global Peace Index published by the Vision of Humanity organization.
Read MoreJeremy Pope was the Sancho Panza to Peter Eigen’s Don Quixote. Together, they were widely seen in 1994 as tilting at windmills, full of enthusiasm for a cause that many viewed as utterly hopeless. The skeptics were wrong.
Read MoreDespite heavy lobbying by some of the United States’ most powerful corporations, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has taken a bold decision in support of transparency. The US Chamber of Commerce claimed that to force US oil, gas and mining companies to reveal details of their foreign payments to natural resources’ host governments would cost a whopping US$16 billion.
Read MoreReducing corruption is a top priority for Americans as they look at the upcoming elections. Yet the candidates are not discussing the issue. Will the reporters posing questions in the presidential debates raise the topic? I doubt it.
Read MoreStandard Chartered Bank, headquartered in the UK, has agreed to settle charges by New York’s banking regulators that it engaged in as much as $250 billion of illicit banking transactions on behalf of Iran in recent years. The bank is paying $340 million to end this legal fracas, but this is not the end of its troubles, just the beginning.
Read MoreAt least 15 of the world’s biggest banks are being investigated by national authorities on both sides of the Atlantic for rigging interest rates, which possibly involved trillions of dollars of transactions, from the mortgages of you and me, to what big corporations have had to pay. So far, only Barclays Bank has been forced to settle – it was fined over $400 million and its chief executive and board chairman were forced to resign.
Read MoreAllegations of insider trading at Nomura, money laundering at HSBC, interest rate manipulation at Barclays – it’s one scandal after another! Some say mega-banks are too complex to manage and control, others blame bad management, still others say the culture is rotten. Corruption abounds. Greed, secrecy, arrogance, lack of a moral compass, and opportunity all combine in too many financial institutions.
Read MoreThe UK is in the midst of an avalanche of corruption, yet as if by magic, it will not place the multiple scandals on hold and distract itself with a feast of Olympic sport. The festivities may indeed bring joy to the public at large, although an abundance of press reports suggest Londoners are grumpy about everything from the rain to the traffic to the sheer cost of the games.
Read MoreThe euro crisis will not be resolved until the citizens of Europe have greater confidence in the ability and the willingness of their national leaders to serve the public interest. Pundits may blame the bankers and politicians may blame the press, but over the last year on many trips to Brussels and Athens I have seen both the patent lack of political leadership and the deep mistrust of ordinary middle class Europeans.
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