Illicit Financial Flows Quotes

African countries lose billions every year because of tax dodging by big corporations and wealthy individuals. They lose billions more from overly generous tax incentives in a misguided belief that this is the only way to attract foreign investment.

You don’t have to sleep with prostitutes or take drugs in order to have a relationship with organized crime. They affect our bank accounts. They affect our communications, our pension funds. They even affect the food that we eat and our governments.

At G-20 summit, I worked with US and other countries to bring black money back.

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.

We will also target tax evasion and off-shore tax havens... Everyone must pay their share.

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.

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

Tracing, freezing, and return of stolen assets has proved in many cases to be exceptionally difficult for most African countries.

Corruption and illicit financial flows are different. But they really must be twinned. This is because, for practical purposes, it is an eminently more sensible approach to treat most of the sources of illicit financial flows as corrupt activity, within a broader use of the term.

We want to put a stop to tax havens. We want results on this, with a list of tax havens and a series of consequences.

If you really want to introduce corruption into legal marijuana, make it an all cash business.

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.

I think that a lot of the money - these big bills - is used to facilitate tax evasion and crime.

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.

Much of the shadow banking sector, a major contributor to the economic crisis, was also only possible because of taxhaven secrecy.

I promise to deliver a corruption-free India... people have chosen our government to get rid of black money.