Africa robbed of about R500bn each year through illicit capital outflows
AFRICAN leaders have hammered their corrupt colleagues and crooked business people for robbing the continent of as much as R500bn through illicit capital outflows.A discussion on the topic on Thursday was prompted by a report which former president Thabo Mbeki tabled during a Pan African Parliament sitting.Mr Mbeki’s report was expected to provide guidelines on how African governments could stem the bleeding as they sought to come up with new laws to achieve this objective.Transfer pricing, trade misinvoicing and other misdeeds were among the ways in which Africa lost much-needed revenue.At least R500bn a year flows out of the continent undetected through fraudulent schemes which enable multinational companies to rob some of Africa’s poorest countries of tax money, according to Mr Mbeki’s report.In February, the African Union summit held in Ethiopia endorsed Mr Mbeki’s report, which was commissioned in 2011, and adopted it into the meeting’s declaration as an area of focus.On Thursd...
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