Even 2 Superpower Economy Getting Difficulties in Eradicating Corruption

Label/Categories  :  World of Money
One of ongoing
USA : JAPAN

New York times report that a suitcase containing $1 million in shrink-wrapped bills, hand-carried into New York by the former president of Gabon for his daughter to buy a Manhattan apartment. Purchases of a stretch Hummer H2 armored limousine and C-130 Hercules military transport planes for a civil war in Angola. And a shell company named Sweet Pink used to funnel millions of dollars into the United States from Equatorial Guinea.


These and other deals and money transfers took place in recent years because of inadequate controls on money laundering at large American banks and unregulated American lawyers, real estate agents and lobbyists, according to a Senate report released late Wednesday.

Report by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which will conduct a hearing on Thursday, sheds new light on how banks like Citigroup, Wachovia and Bank of America unwittingly shifted hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of African politicians, their relatives and associates.

The report details how Teodoro Nguema Obiang, the son of Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the president of Equatorial Guinea, used lawyers, bankers, real estate agents and escrow agents, all Americans, from 2004 through 2008 to move more than $110 million into the United States, including $100 million through Wachovia and Citibank.

Mr. Obiang, the subject of a criminal investigation into charges of money laundering, bribery and extortion, also employed Sidley Austin Brown & Wood, a law firm now known as Sidley Austin, to help him buy a $38.5 million Gulfstream G-5 jet in 2005, the report says.

The report says two American lawyers, Michael Berger and George Nagler, helped Mr. Obiang circumvent controls at the banks by setting up accounts for shell companies with names like Beautiful Vision, Unlimited Horizon and Sweet Pink, named on honor of the rapper Eve, Mr. Obiang’s girlfriend at the time.

Mr. Obiang, Equatorial Guinea’s minister of agriculture and forestry, used the accounts to pay his personal expenses, including chefs and butlers for his home in Malibu, Calif., and bills at Ferrari of Beverly Hills and Dolce & Gabbana, receipts cited in the report show. He also arranged for Mr. Berger to be invited to the 2007 “Kandy Halloween Bash” at the Playboy Mansion, the report says.

Read more on http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/business

JAPAN

Japan grow with its great culture in business, but there is a "zannen" in culture of servicing client or business partner, including their government official. The big hole of corruption  comes from its culture and the new goverment try hard to change their corrupt bureaucracy. Take a look on this news below ....

It sounds like a script written for Hollywood: an idealistic reformer put in charge of cleaning up his nation’s most powerful center of entrenched bureaucratic influence.

Finance Minister Naoto Kan, who took office this week, has limited experience in running Japan's economy, but he is known for challenging government corruption and bureaucracy.

Political experts say that the appointment Thursday of Naoto Kan, a former civic campaigner against government corruption, to run the Finance Ministry does just that, pitting a veteran bureaucracy fighter against the most formidable of the central ministries that have presided over Japan’s postwar economic rise and subsequent stagnation.

They say that the choice of Mr. Kan, a deputy They say that the choice of Mr. Kan, a deputy prime minister with limited experience in running the nation’s economy, shows the desire of the new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, to step up efforts to achieve his government’s main goal: changing the way Japan is governed by shifting power to elected politicians, away from career bureaucrats.

Mr. Kan will have his work cut out for him, battling a secretive institution that claims historical roots going back 13 centuries and that has long drawn the best and brightest graduates from top universities. The ministry has long wielded enormous influence over Japan, the world’s second largest economy, using its broad budgetary powers to control the nation’s purse strings.

In his first news conference since taking office, Mr. Kan vowed Thursday to impose his will on the ministry.

“In ways both good and bad, the Finance Ministry has been a symbolic presence in Kasumigaseki,” said Mr. Kan, 63, referring to the district in Tokyo where the central ministries’ head offices are located. “It will now become a model of how to change Kasumigaseki.”

Mr. Kan replaced Hirohisa Fujii, 77, who stepped down for health reasons. Though respected in the Democratic Party, Mr. Fujii was facing increasing criticism in the Japanese news media for allowing ministry bureaucrats to control the 2010 budget, undermining the new government’s efforts to put politicians in charge.

Read more on http://www.nytimes.com/