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.
No U.S. secretary of state devoted as much energy, time and determination to encourage non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in many difficult and dangerous parts of the world to speak truth to power. Her actions in support of human rights, the building of democracy, the strengthening of the rule of law, and opposition to government-driven corruption, were remarkable.
Read MoreDramatic changes lie ahead for Afghanistan — none of them encouraging. President Obama has confirmed that U.S. military presence in the country will wind down over the next 18 months. Responsibility for the country's governance, security and economy will rest on Afghan shoulders. The tragedy is that the government of Hamid Karzai is a cesspool of corruption, and much of the looting has been of the tens of billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers.
Read MoreIt was late 1992 and Peter Eigen was putting the finishing touches to plans that would see the launch of Transparency International in 1993. For several years Eigen, then a veteran World Bank senior official, had been waging a campaign inside the Bank and across the development aid community to build understanding of how corruption – the abuse of power for personal gain – was wrecking anti-poverty projects in many of the world’s poorest countries.
Read MoreThe punishment needs to fit the crime, but are some giant multinational corporations now so large that they no longer can be punished effectively?
Our free enterprise system depends upon all competitors playing by the rules and when one seeks special advantage by paying bribes, then the system is subverted. When that one is a giant company, for example, Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, then the victims are manifold, starting with its direct business competitors.
Read MoreThe 2012 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), published this week, finds Afghanistan at absolute rock bottom, sharing this dismal place with North Korea and Somalia. Despite the flow to Afghanistan over the last decade of hundreds of billions of dollars of Western – mostly American – economic and military aid, this country is a rotten cesspool of corruption.
Read MoreMany of my friends leading human rights and anti-corruption organizations from Bahrain to Zimbabwe face rising threats from national governments and their security forces. The vice is tightening in one country after another on activists for human rights, political reform, freedom of speech, and anti-corruption.
Read MoreThe Greek government, under international pressure to attack rampant domestic corruption, acted on Monday by hauling an investigative journalist into court. Costas Vaxevanis faces trial for having published the names of 2,059 Greeks who have accounts at the HSBC bank in Switzerland.
Read MoreThe blasts at bankers as being corrupt are not about to subside. Recent high-profile allegations against some of the largest banks, from charges of interest rate manipulation, to breaking U.S. sanctions on Iran, to vast money-laundering schemes, are just a taste of what is to come. Never before have there been so many investigations by such a multitude of official agencies in the U.S. and abroad of the possible malfeasance of bankers.
Read MoreHas 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.
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