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When we talk about corruption,
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there are typical types of individuals that spring to mind.
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There's the former Soviet megalomaniacs.
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Saparmurat Niyazov, he was one of them.
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Until his death in 2006,
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he was the all-powerful leader of Turkmenistan,
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a Central Asian country rich in natural gas.
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Now, he really loved to issue Presidential decrees.
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In one, renamed the months of the year
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including after himself and his mother.
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He spent millions of dollars
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creating a bizarre personality cult,
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and his crowning glory was the building
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of a 40-foot high gold-plated statue of himself
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which stood proudly in the capital's central square
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and rotated to follow the sun.
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He was a slightly unusual guy.
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And then there's that cliché,
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the African dictator or minister or official.
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There's Teodorin Obiang.
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So his daddy is president for life of Equatorial Guinea,
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a West African nation that has exported
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billions of dollars of oil since the 1990s
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and yet has a truly appalling human rights record.
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The vast majority of its people
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are living in really miserable poverty
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despite an income per capita that's on a par
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with that of Portugal.
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So Obiang, Jr., well, he buys himself
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a $30 million mansion in Malibu, California.
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I've been up to its front gates.
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I can tell you it's a magnificent spread.
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He bought an €18 million art collection
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that used to belong to fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent,
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a stack of fabulous sports cars,
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some costing a million dollars a piece,
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oh, and a Gulfstream jet too.
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Now get this:
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until recently, he was earning an official monthly salary
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of less than 7,000 dollars.
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And there's Dan Etete.
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Well, he was the former Oil Minister of Nigeria
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under President Abacha,
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and it just so happens he's a convicted money-launderer too.
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We've spent a great deal of time
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investigating a billion-dollar
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— that's right, a billion-dollar —
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oil deal that he was involved with,
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and what we found was pretty shocking,
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but more about that later.
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So it's easy to think that corruption happens
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somewhere kind of over there,
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carried out by a bunch of greedy despots
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and individuals up to no good in countries
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that we, personally, may know very little about
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and feel really unconnected to
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and unaffected by what might be going on.
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But does it just happen over there?
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Well, at 22, I was very lucky.
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My first job out of university
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was investigating the illegal trade in African ivory.
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And that's how my relationship with corruption really began.
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In 1993, with two friends who were colleagues,
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Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley,
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we set up an organization called Global Witness.
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Our first campaign was investigating the role
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of illegal logging in funding the war in Cambodia.
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So a few years later, and it's now 1997,
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and I'm in Angola undercover investigating blood diamonds.
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Perhaps you saw the film,
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the Hollywood film "Blood Diamond,"
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the one with Leonardo DiCaprio.
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Well, some of that sprang from our work.
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Luanda, it was full of land mine victims
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who were struggling to survive on the streets
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and war orphans living in sewers under the streets,
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and a tiny, very wealthy elite
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who gossiped about shopping trips to Brazil and Portugal.
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And it was a slightly crazy place.
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So I'm sitting in a hot and very stuffy hotel room
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feeling just totally overwhelmed.
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But it wasn't about blood diamonds.
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Because I'd been speaking to lots of people there
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who, well, they talked about a different problem:
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that of a massive web of corruption on a global scale
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and millions of oil dollars going missing.
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And for what was then a very small organization
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of just a few people,
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trying to even begin to think of how we might tackle that
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was an enormous challenge.
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And in the years that I've been,
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and we've all been campaigning and investigating,
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I've repeatedly seen that what makes corruption
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on a global, massive scale possible,
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well it isn't just greed or the misuse of power
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or that nebulous phrase "weak governance."
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I mean, yes, it's all of those,
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but corruption, it's made possible by the actions
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of global facilitators.
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So let's go back to some of those people I talked about earlier.
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Now, they're all people we've investigated,
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and they're all people who couldn't do what they do alone.
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Take Obiang, Jr. Well, he didn't end up
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with high-end art and luxury houses without help.
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He did business with global banks.
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A bank in Paris held accounts of companies controlled by him,
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one of which was used to buy the art,
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and American banks, well, they funneled
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73 million dollars into the States,
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some of which was used to buy that California mansion.
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And he didn't do all of this in his own name either.
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He used shell companies.
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He used one to buy the property, and another,
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which was in somebody else's name,
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to pay the huge bills it cost to run the place.
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And then there's Dan Etete.
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Well, when he was Oil Minister,
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he awarded an oil block now worth over a billion dollars
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to a company that, guess what, yeah,
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he was the hidden owner of.
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Now, it was then much later traded on
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with the kind assistance of the Nigerian government
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— now I have to be careful what I say here —
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to subsidiaries of Shell and the Italian Eni,
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two of the biggest oil companies around.
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So the reality is is that the engine of corruption,
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well, it exists far beyond the shores of countries
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like Equatorial Guinea or Nigeria or Turkmenistan.
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This engine, well, it's driven
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by our international banking system,
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by the problem of anonymous shell companies,
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and by the secrecy that we have afforded
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big oil, gas, and mining operations,
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and, most of all, by the failure of our politicians
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to back up their rhetoric and do something
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really meaningful and systemic to tackle this stuff.
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Now let's take the banks first.
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Well, it's not going to come as any surprise
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for me to tell you that banks accept dirty money,
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but they prioritize their profits in other destructive ways too.
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For example, in Sarawak, Malaysia.
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Now this region, it has just five percent
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of its forests left intact. Five percent.
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So how did that happen?
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Well, because an elite and its facilitators
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have been making millions of dollars
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from supporting loggin on an industrial scale
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for many years.
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So we sent an undercover investigator in
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to secretly film meetings with members of the ruling elite,
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and the resulting footage, well, it made some people very angry,
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and you can see that on YouTube,
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but it proved what we had long suspected,
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because it showed how the state's chief minister,
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despite his later denials,
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used his control over land and forest licenses
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to enrich himself and his family.
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And HSBC, well, we know that HSBC bankrolled
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the region's largest logging companies
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that were responsible for some that destruction
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in Sarawak and elsewhere.
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The bank violated its own sustainability policies in the process,
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but it earned around 130 million dollars.
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Now shortly after our exposé,
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very shortly after our exposé earlier this year,
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the bank announced a policy review on this,
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and, well, is this progress? Um, maybe,
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but we're going to be keeping a very close eye
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on that case.
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And then there's the problem of anonymous shell companies.
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Well, we've all heard about what they are, I think,
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and we all know they're used quite a bit
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by people and companies who are trying to avoid
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paying their proper dues to society,
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also known as taxes.
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But what doesn't usually come to light
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is how shell companies are used to steal
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huge sums of money, transformational sums of money,
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from poor countries.
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In virtually every case of corruption that we've investigated,
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shell companies have appeared,
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and sometimes it's been impossible to find out
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who is really involved in the deal.
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A recent study by the World Bank
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looked at 200 cases of corruption.
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It found that over 70 percent of those cases
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had used anonymous shell companies,
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totaling almost 56 billion dollars.
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Now many of these countries were in America
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or the United Kingdom,
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its overseas territories and Crown dependencies,
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and so it's not just an off-shore problem,
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it's an on-shore one too.
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You see, shell companies, they're central
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to the secret deals which may benefit wealthy elites
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rather than ordinary citizens.
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One striking recent case that we've investigated
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is how the government in the Democratic Republic of Congo
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sold off a series of valuable, state-owned mining assets
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to shell companies in the British Virgin Islands.
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So we spoke to sources in country,
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trolled through company documents and other information
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trying to piece together a really true picture of the deal.
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And we were alarmed to find that these shell companies
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had quickly flipped many of the assets on
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for huge profits to major international mining companies
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listed in London.
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Now, the Africa Progress Panel, led by Kofi Annan,
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they've calculated that Congo may have lost
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more than 1.3 billion dollars from these deals.
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That's more than twice, that's almost twice
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the country's annual health and education budget combined.
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And will the people of Congo, will they ever get their money back?
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Well, the answer to that question,
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and who was really involved and what really happened,
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well that's going to probably remain locked away
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in the secretive company registries of the British Virgin Islands
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and elsewhere unless we all do something about it.
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And how about the oil, gas, and mining companies?
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Okay, maybe it's a bit of a cliché to talk about them.
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Corruption in that sector, no surprise,
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there's corruption everywhere, so why focus on that sector?
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Well, because there's a lot at stake.
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In 2011, natural resource exports
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outweighed aid flows by almost 19 to one
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in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Nineteen to one.
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Now that's a hell of a lot of schools and universities
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and hospitals and business startups,
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many of which haven't materialized and never will
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because some of that money has simply been stolen away.
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Now let's go back to the oil and mining companies,
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and let's go back to Dan Etete and that billion-dollar deal.
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And now forgive me, I'm going to read the next bit
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because it's a very live issue, and our lawyers
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have been through this in some detail
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and they want me to get it right.
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Now, on the surface, the deal appeared straightforward.
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Subsidiaries of Shell and Eni
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paid the Nigerian government for the block.
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The Nigerian government transferred
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precisely the same amount to the very dollar
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to an account earmarked for a shell company
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whose hidden owner was Etete.
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Now, that's not bad going for a convicted money-launderer.
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And here's the thing.
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After many months of digging around
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and reading through hundreds of pages of court documents,
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we found evidence that, in fact,
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Shell and Eni had known that the funds
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would be transferred to that shell company,
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and frankly, it's hard to believe they didn't know
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who they were really dealing with there.
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Now, it just shouldn't take these sort of efforts
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to find out where the money in deals like this went.
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I mean, these are state assets.
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They're supposed to be used for the benefit
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of the people in the country.
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But in some countries, citizens and journalists
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who are trying to expose stories like this
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have been harassed and arrested
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and some have even risked their lives to do so.
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And finally, well, there are those who believe
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that corruption is unavoidable.
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It's just how some business is done.
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It's too complex and difficult to change.
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So in effect, what, we just accept it.
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But as a campaigner and investigator,
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I have a different view,
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because I've seen what can happen
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when an idea gains momentum.
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In the oil and mining sector, for example,
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there is now the beginning
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of a truly worldwide transparency standard
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that could tackle some of these problems.
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In 1999, when Global Witness called
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for oil companies to make payments on deals transparent,
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well, some people laughed at the extreme naiveté
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of that small idea.
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But literally hundreds of civil society groups
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from around the world came together
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to fight for transparency,
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and now it's fast becoming the norm and the law.
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Two thirds of the value
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of the world's oil and mining companies
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are now covered by transparency laws. Two thirds.
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So this is change happening.
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This is progress.
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But we're not there yet, by far.
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Because it really isn't about corruption
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somewhere over there, is it.
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In a globalized world, corruption
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is a truly globalized business,
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and one that needs global solutions,
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supported and pushed by us all, as global citizens,
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right here.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)