By IPS Correspondents
WASHINGTON, Sep 17 2007 (IPS)

The United Nations and World Bank launched a bid Monday to strip crooked leaders of the money they steal from poor countries, and to plough the sums into health and development efforts.

“From now on it should be harder for kleptocrats to steal the public’s money, and easier for the public to get its money back,” said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the world body’s agency in charge of the initiative.

Bent leaders cheat developing countries of 1 trillion-1.6 trillion dollars a year through smuggling, corruption and tax evasion, according to a report released to mark the launch of the Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative.

Recovering even a portion of the stolen assets could provide financing for social programmes or infrastructure.

“Every 100 million dollars recovered could fund full vaccinations for 4 million children, provide water connections for some 250,000 households, or fund treatment for over 600,000 people with HIV/AIDS for a full year,” the report said.

The initiative will seek to prevent the theft by helping developing countries to improve governance and accountability and by urging wealthy countries to stop providing safe havens for the loot.

Half of the 30 free-market democracies in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development have ratified the treaty, as have 13 of the 54 jurisdictions classified by the International Monetary Fund as offshore financial centres. These include British crown dependencies such as Guernsey and the Isle of Man; Bermuda and the Bahamas among others in the Caribbean; European states such as Liechtenstein and Monaco; Pacific island states including Samoa and Vanuatu; and parts or all of Djibouti, Malaysia, Panama, and the United States.

As with many international pacts, the corruption convention has not been high among many parliaments’ priorities. Finance firms and regulators also have voiced concern about reconciling the treaty’s requirements against national laws and standards.

Efforts to clean up also have been hamstrung by scandals involving allegations of fraud and nepotism at the World Bank and in the U.N. system.

Even so, Monday’s initiative sets out to bring financial centres into compliance with anti-money laundering legislation that would detect and deter laundering of illicit proceeds, and to strengthen financial intelligence units’ capacity to enhance cooperation across the globe.

Developing countries will be able to tap the initiative for help in beefing up prosecuting agencies, officials said. Loans and grants will be made available alongside advice to countries lacking sufficient capacity to pursue stolen assets.

The initiative also is intended to monitor the use of recovered assets so that repatriated loot is used for development purposes.

“Tough safeguards will be needed to ensure that returned assets do not get stolen again by a new generation of leaders,” Costa, the UNODC chief, said in a published commentary. “That means monitoring the use of recovered funds by officially recording the receipt of the assets, declaring their intended use, and reporting on expenditure.”

Significant sums have been siphoned off: Public officials in developing and former Soviet-bloc countries pocket bribes worth at least 20 billion-40 billion dollars a year – roughly 20-40 percent the value of all official development aid, said the report released Monday.

Anti-corruption group Transparency International has estimated that Suharto, who was forced to resign as Indonesian president in 1998, embezzled 15 billion-35 billion dollars from his compatriots. Deceased former heads of state Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko of the former Zaire, and Sani Abacha of Nigeria pocketed as much as 5 billion dollars each, the watchdog added.

Africa loses 148 billion dollars – 25 percent of its economic output – to corruption every year, according to the African Union.

U.N. agencies said that in the 1990s, corrupt officials pocketed 5.5 billion dollars in Nigeria and three billion dollars in Kenya.

Recovering stolen assets can be a time-consuming business: It took the Philippines 18 years to get back 624 million dollars that Marcos had secreted in Swiss bank accounts.

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