Author Archives: Diana Latona

What Is a GONGO?

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How government-sponsored groups masquerade as civil society.

The Myanmar Women’s Affairs Federation is a GONGO. So is Nashi, a Russian youth group, and the Sudanese Human Rights Organization. Saudi Arabia’s International Islamic Relief Organization is also a GONGO, as is Chongryon, the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan. GONGOs are everywhere, in China, Cuba, France, Tunisia, and even the United States.

GONGOs are government-sponsored non-governmental organizations. Behind this contradictory and almost laughable tongue twister lies an important and growing global trend that deserves more scrutiny: governments funding and controlling nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), often stealthily. Some GONGOs are benign, others irrelevant. But many, including those mentioned above, are dangerous.

Attack Of The GONGOs: Government-Organized NGOs Flood Warsaw Meeting.

Some of these NGOs are not like the other ones.
ne’s Russian-occupied territory of Crimea to Central Asia, repressive regimes in former Soviet republics have been setting up fake nongovernmental organizations — so-called GONGOs — to try to influence the international debate about their poor human rights records.

Some GONGOs from Central Asia furtively attempted to infiltrate a coalition of bona fide civil-society activists who work with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

New York-based Human Rights Watch says GONGOs from Tajikistan that have been proliferating since 2016 were in large concentrations at the OSCE’s Human Dimension Implementation Meeting (HDIM) in Warsaw, and even threatened self-exiled Tajik rights activists who view the forum as the only international venue where they can call attention to abuses by the authorities in Dushanbe.

Russia-backed GONGOs at the conference blatantly championed the Kremlin’s policy goals in Crimea — leading to angry shouting matches with Ukrainian government delegates who walked out in protest….Rferl.org

Finger-Puppets: Kremlin planning to get back in the GONGO business in a big way

From Anti-Corruption To Criminal Justice Reform

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Elizabeth Warren is becoming Trump’s greatest threat

Dean Obeidallah reports:  How did Warren climb from single digits in national polls in March to now topping Biden in the new Iowa poll? She hit all the right notes with Democrats and especially with the progressive wing of the party. Her debate performances have been consistently very good. Warren’s ‘I have a plan for that’ mantra where she has released detailed plans for policy issues facing our nation from childcare to anti-corruption to criminal justice reform — and the list goes on — has resonated with voters…..CNNSearch Elisabeth Warren

How Mauritius Leaks Got Started

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Mauritius Leaks is our cross-border investigation into how one law firm on a small island off Africa’s east coast helped companies leach tax revenue from poor African, Arab and Asian nations.

Led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the investigation is a collaboration by 54 journalists in 18 countries.

More than 200,000 documents from the Mauritius office of a prestigious offshore law firm, Conyers Dill & Pearman, are at the heart of the investigation. ICIJ corroborated company information from the leaked documents with data in the Mauritius corporate registry and the Financial Services Commission’s register of licensees.

The documents offer a rare window into corporate tax avoidance in countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Read the full investigation: icij.org/investigations/mauritius-leaks

icij.org

All You Need To Know About The Free-Trade Zones

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What is a free port?  Plans have been mooted for tax-free zones to offset post-Brexit tariffs. But are they needed? And do they actually work?

Lux goods: inside Luxembourg’s warehouse for the super-rich.
The medieval Cinque Ports of southern England and the northern European Hanseatic League benefited from special privileges, while bonded warehouses in the 19th century handed out tax breaks on alcohol and tobacco.

Ireland created the Shannon free zone in 1959 to encourage activity at its struggling airport.

Britain operated several free ports as recently as 2012, when the government stopped renewing their licences. Created in the 1980s, they included Birmingham, Belfast, Cardiff, Liverpool, Prestwick and Southampton. A free port remains in operation on the Isle of Man – a crown dependency and therefore not part of the EU or UK.

Does the UK need to leave the EU to establish free ports?Within the EU, there are currently 82 free ports or zones in 21 EU member states, including historic free ports such as Copenhagen and Bremen, raising questions over whether the UK would need to leave the EU to make more use of them.The UK has in recent years created 61 enterprise zones – which differ from free zones but still benefit from tax breaks – including the Ceramic Valley in Stoke-on-Trent and the Dorset innovation park.Obstacles could arise, however, if the government created free zones with particularly aggressive benefits equivalent to tax havens, which could be contested under EU law.

Other nations could still object at the World Trade Organisation, while aggressive tax policies and state support could hinder a post-Brexit trade deal with the EU.Would free zones benefit the UK?…TheGuardian

Inside the Luxembourg free port storing riches for the super-wealthy. Depending on who you speak to, Le Freeport is a high-security storage facility or a money-laundering risk…Theguardian

(Illustration by Terry LaBan)

How Britain can help you get away with stealing millions

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A five-step guide
Dirty money needs laundering if it’s to be of any use – and the UK is the best place in the world to do it.

Oliver Bullough reports:  Kleptocrats, fraudsters and crooks steal hundreds of billions of pounds, dollars and euros from the rest of us every year, but that gives them a problem: how can they stop the rest of us knowing what they’ve done with the proceeds? They have to stop their haul looking suspicious, to cleanse it of any criminal taint, or face losing their hard-stolen cash.

Money laundering, as this process is known, is notoriously difficult to uncover, investigate and prosecute. Occasionally, however, an insider breaks cover – someone such as Howard Wilkinson, who blew the whistle on perhaps the largest money-laundering scheme in history, the movement of €200bn of suspect funds through the Estonian branch of Denmark’s biggest bank between 2007 and 2015, most of it earned in the dodgier corners of the former Soviet Union, some perhaps belonging to Vladimir Putin himself.
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“No one really knows where this money went,” Wilkinson, a former Danske Bank employee, told Denmark’s parliament last year. Once the money had got into the global financial system, “it was clean, it was free.”

Britain’s most famous money launderer is HSBC, thanks to its systematic cleansing of the earnings of the Latin American drug cartels over the second half of the last decade, for which it was fined $1.9bn by the US government in 2012. But that was a tiny operation compared to the Danske Bank scandal. If gathered together, the suspect funds moved through the bank’s Estonian outpost could buy HSBC, with more than enough left over to buy Danske Bank too.

The scandal has been big news in Denmark and Estonia, but barely grazed public consciousness in the UK. This is strange, because Britain played a key role. All of the owners of the bank accounts that first aroused Wilkinson’s suspicions had their identity hidden behind corporate structures registered in the UK – including Lantana Trade LLP, the one that may have been connected to Putin. That means this is not just a Russian, Estonian or Danish scandal, but something far closer to home. In November, Wilkinson told a European parliament committee that the countries hosting these companies are just as culpable. “Worst of all is the United Kingdom,” he said. “The United Kingdom is an absolute disgrace.”

The British government is supposedly committed to tackling grand corruption and financial crime, yet Britain’s involvement in this mega-scandal has never been mentioned in parliament, or been addressed by ministers. It is far from the first time that British companies have been involved in high-profile money-laundering. Among the characters who have used British shell companies to hide their money are Paul Manafort, disgraced former chairman of Donald Trump’s election campaign, and Viktor Yanukovich, overthrown president of Ukraine, among thousands of lower-profile opportunists…..TheGuardian

Illustration: Leon Edler/The Guardian

New Ranking Reveals Corporate Tax Havens

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New ranking reveals corporate tax havens behind breakdown of global corporate tax system; toll of UK’s tax war exposed.
Researchers call for new tax rules to “tax corporations where employees work, not where ledgers hide”

Decades of tax wars among the world’s richest countries are unravelling the century-old global corporate tax system, new research finds. Forty per cent of today’s cross-border direct investments reported by the IMF – $18 trillion in value – are being booked in just 10 countries that offer corporate tax rates of 3 per cent or less.

The Corporate Tax Haven Index, published today by the Tax Justice Network, has identified the UK and a handful of OECD countries as the jurisdictions most responsible for the breakdown of the global corporate tax system – with the UK bearing the lion’s share of responsibility through its controlled network of satellite jurisdictions. These countries have aggressively undermined the ability of governments across the world to meaningfully tax multinational corporations. An estimated $500 billion in corporate tax is dodged each year globally by multinational corporations1 – enough to pay the UN’s under-funded humanitarian aid budget 20 times over every year…..Taxjustice.net

Euro Babble

Money Laundering Through Bitcoin

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Caught and Led to Astonishing Discoveries.

Shehryar Hasan reports:  After an undercover investigation, Cyprus R. Vance, the district attorney of Manhattan, has indicted money launderers and dark web drug dealers who reportedly sold and shipped drugs to 43 states in the U.S. and laundered $2.3 million using bitcoins.

Chester Anderton, Jarrette Codd and Roland MacCarty were indicted for dealing in Xanax tablets and other controlled substances like fentanyl-laced heroin, methamphetamine, ketamine, alprazolam, steroids, and pill presses on the dark web. They reportedly sold these drugs to 43 states. Apart from that, they also laundered $2.3 million using bitcoins.

The seizure of approximately 420,000 to 620,000 alprazolam tablets, 500 glassines of fenanyl-laced heroin, and other quantities of metamphetamine, ketamine, gamma hydroxybutyric acid, and other substances also marks the biggest seizure of pills in the history of New Jersey. The district attorney stated: Not only is this the first time state prosecutors in New York have taken down a dark web storefront, this take down represents the largest pill seizure in New Jersey’s history….Blockpublisher.com

Criminals use Bitcoin to Launder Dirty Money

International Action Against Money-Laundering ‘Laundromats’

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PACE urges international action against money-laundering ‘laundromats’

PACE has expressed its deep concern at the extent of money laundering in Council of Europe member States, notably the recent examples known as the “Global Laundromat”, the “Azerbaijani Laundromat” and the “Troika Laundromat”, and has urged improved national mechanisms and international co-operation to combat it.

In a resolution based on a report by Mart van de Ven (Netherlands, ALDE), the Assembly said these “laundromats” involved large sums of money from wealthy businessmen, organised criminals and high officials. They exploited various weaknesses across multiple jurisdictions, including shell companies, often based in the United Kingdom or its Overseas Territories, and poorly regulated banks, notably in the Baltics.

The Global Laundromat involved corrupt Moldovan judges, the parliamentarians said, while the Troika Laundromat involved people close to the heart of state power and the Azerbaijani Laundromat contributed to corruptive activities within the Parliamentary Assembly itself. None has been adequately investigated by national authorities.

The Assembly makes a series of recommendations to member States, to the European Union and to the Committee of Ministers intended to reinforce the international fight against money laundering, organised crime and corruption.

The fight against ML and FT is about how to protect the rule of law, human rights and democracy against dangerous, destructive forces. Forces that have already damaged European democracy.

Pls. see the speech from rapporteur Mart van de Ven (Netherlands, ALDE) presenting his report to the Council of Europe…occrp.org/en/troikalaundromat

Watch the Video Report:

https://vodmanager.coe.int/coe/webcast/coe/2019-04-11-2/en/4

Artist Fernando Lllera
https://www.w-t-w.org/en/fernando-llera/

No Money For Terror

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This week, an international project to disrupt the funding of terrorist activities brought together more than 50 experts in counter terrorism financing (CTF) at Europol’s headquarters in The Hague. The conference’s key objective was to strengthen the international network of CTF investigation units, enhance public-private partnership cooperation and improve big data analysis to fight terrorist financing efficiently.

The conference is part of a two-year project coined BeCaNet (best practice, capacity building and networking initiative among public and private actors against terrorism financing). The BeCaNet initiative brings together public and private players and is directed by the German Federal Criminal Police (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA). Official partners of BeCaNet are the police state security units from France (Sous-Direction Anti-Terroriste, SDAT), the Spanish National Police (Comisaría General de Información, CGI), the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Europol….No money for terror/ europol

Arend van Dam
www.w-t-w.org/en/arend-van-dam

Why Women Make Great Whistleblowers

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Historically, women have been the ones to shed light on some of the most egregious cases of fraud and waste in government, corporations and other organizations. ‘Women Whistleblowers’ the website and social media campaign features many of these courageous women and has garnered the attention of the online community as a whole. On Facebook alone, over 63,000 people have liked the Women Whistleblowers page, and many others engage with the campaign via Twitter and Instagram. ..Why Women Make Great Whistleblowers


Whistleblowing Women
Whistleblower-Netzwerk E.V.