Former President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki yesterday in Abuja described as challenging and worrisome failure of African countries to identify sources of illegal financial outflows (IFF).
Mbeki, who chairs the African Union (AU) High Level Panel (HLP) on illicit financial outflows from Africa, stressed that there is need for global collaboration against the scourge as a way of reducing its attendant negative effects on not only the development of African continent, but also the globe as a whole.
It would be recalled that Global Financial Integrity, a Washington, D.C based and non-profit research and advisory organization which is heavily involved in the IFF fight, had listed the main channels for IFFs as: nefarious commercial activities of multinational companies, drug trafficking and smuggling, bribery and embezzlement, over-invoicing or under-pricing trade deals, transfer pricing (avoiding taxes by setting prices in trading between their divisions), offshore banking and the use of tax havens.
“In the course of advocating a way out of the plague, I discovered that only global collaboration will help combat it, because it has become very challenging and worrisome to us as Africans, and the rest of the world,” he said.
Also speaking, the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami disclosed that the country has achieved a lot in arresting corrupt practices and has reduced illicit financial outflows.
According to Malami, the country has succeeded in establishing institutions and with the responsibility of taming corruption and illicit financial flows.
Such institutions include the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), Central Authority Unit and the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU).
“We have succeeded in establishing and have saddled with responsibilities various anti graft agencies and have deployed different technological supports targeted at supporting these institutions in the discharge of their duties,” he added.
Explaining further, the AGF said that the whistle blowing policy of the Buhari administration was aimed at exposing corruption andassociated practices in the system.
