Thomas Pogge Quotes

It's interesting that Swiss banks also hide their assets from the Swiss by using offshore bank structuring.

Our job is to protect bank customers, not banks.

Cyprus has a reputation as a laundromat for the Russians who are trying to avoid sanctions.

If you look around in London, there is a lot of dirty money. People see it as a safe haven: a bolthole to rely on if they are criminal or politically exposed in their own country.

If we can rid the world of financial centres that thrive on lack of transparency, non-cooperation, and weak regulation, an important step towards a fairer and cleaner world economy will have been achieved.

We shouldn't be encouraging people to set up Cayman Island funds.

I'm tired of seeing the press equate Monaco with money laundering.

Our international banking system allows banks to accept funds gained from tax evasion and other crimes and thereby facilitates and encourages embezzlement by public officials, especially in developing countries, as well as tax evasion and tax avoidance by multinational corporations.

The massive corruption common in so many developing countries would be quite impossible if Western countries did not provide convenient opportunities to ship ill-gotten funds out of the country. It wouldn't make much sense for a ruler to store in his basement large quantities of stolen cash in his own country's currency. A corrupt ruler wants to be able to keep this money safe and to be able to spend it. And for this, he needs to convert it into a Western currency and store it in a bank abroad, where it can also earn investment returns and be bequeathed to his heirs.

Changing much-cherished bank secrecy laws is worth the effort. Corruption, tax evasion, and the capture of natural resource revenues undermine the rule of law, weaken the social fabric, erode citizens' trust in institutions, fuel conflict and insecurity, and hamper job creation.

Reliable numbers about the amount of dirty money around the world are difficult to come by. But according to an estimate by the nonprofit Global Financial Integrity group, $1 trillion vanishes from the developing world's economies every year.

We have never heard of laundering in Macau; money laundering is unheard of. Mind you, my casino, every bit of money - someone says Stanley Ho, you issue me a check of so much money - we don't give that easy.

Why do tax havens exist? Because rich countries allow them to. If the U.S. came down on tax havens in the same way they come down on countries that trade with Iran and Cuba, we'd have no tax havens in the world.

Secret bank accounts are for laundering dirty money. Heads of state at the UN should put an end them. That would be the best way of tracking down the drug traffickers.

Washington should revive international efforts begun during the Clinton administration to pressure countries with dangerously loose banking regulations to adopt and enforce stricter rules.

Corruption, money laundering, and tax evasion are global problems, not just challenges for developing countries.

In 25 years of exile, I've never had a frozen account, either in Switzerland or elsewhere in the world.

There will be huge scandals because there is too much money washing around …. And we don’t know who’s behind it.

A very small proportion of the country's black money is in the movie industry. Because we are written about, public attention is focused on us. Do you think there is no black money in other businesses? With the exception of government servants and others who have tax deducted at source, there are tax evaders in every walk of life.

As she was about to run for president in 2008, Clinton opposed a free-trade agreement with Panama - an agreement that, as Sanders pointed out, would make the kind of money-laundering we learned about from the Panama papers even more pervasive.

Shell companies can be owned by other shell companies; opaque offshore vehicles are carefully designed so that regulators can't identify who is using them; with the right accountants, they can be set up quickly and easily.

There is nothing inevitable about this secret offshore world. It is not a fact of nature: Our laws created tax havens, and our laws can also end them. We could forbid Goldman Sachs from owning opaque offshore vehicles. We could prevent companies such as Cadre from accepting anonymous investments.

We in Nigeria have seen just how difficult it is to get back stolen assets from the international financial system, such as banks that ought not have received those funds in the first place if even the most routine questions were asked.

Denmark and Estonia both refused to prosecute the Danske Bank case when we filed in 2013.

Only criminals want to use cash.