General News

Zakiya Serguro, Managing Partner of Frank Partners will join the Nordic Business Ethics Day on 29 April 2021. Zakiya has spent the majority of her career in risk consulting with direct knowledge of best-practice solutions to assess Integrity and ESG risks identified in hundreds of due diligence, M&A, stakeholder analysis, political risk projects and investigations she has conducted in emerging markets, in particular. Ahead of the Business Ethics Day, Zakiya was interviewed by Nordic Business Ethics (NBE): Zakiya, based on your experience, what are the typical failures that Nordic companies face in third party due [...]

As countries across Europe went into lockdown earlier this year to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, there was one early and obvious casualty: transparency. In the rush to obtain critical supplies, many countries suspended their usual public procurement rules, resulting in billions of euros of spending that remains largely hidden from the public. So we at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) decided to find out what happened to that money. Along with media partners in 37 countries, we collected information from over 37,800 COVID-19 related tenders and contracts [...]

A majority of Europe’s largest banks are relying on tax havens to stash their profits, despite the fact that in some cases, these firms don’t have a single employee working where these earnings are booked, a new report released on Tuesday by Transparency International EU revealed. he Report found that HSBC Bank booked $1.77 billion in profit in Saudi Arabia over the last 5 years, despite having no employees located there. (Credit: C Ford CC BY-SA 3.0)The report, which analyzed 39 of the biggest banks in the European Union, found [...]

Transparency International presents the latest edition of Exporting Corruption Report 2020: Assessing Enforcement of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, which evaluates the progress of states in combating bribery of foreign public officials in international commercial transactions and rates the performance of 47 exporting countries, including 43 countries that are signatories of the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development (OECD) Convention. According to the report, for the first time in recent years, Spain made significant advances in enforcement against foreign bribery, including a small improvement in prevention and detection measures. Towards more [...]