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John Christensen ■ Guinea: A slow death facilitated by lawyers, accountants and financial advisers

Guinea: A slow death facilitated by lawyers, accountants and financial advisers

John Christensen

Published:

23 January 2014

Reading time:

< 1

Category:

Financialisation ↘ Inequality and human rights ↘

Tags:

Alpha Condé

The Guardian has posted a comment from Guinean President, Alpha Condé, currently in Davos at the 2014 World Economic Forum. He gets straight to business in his first paragraph: “As president of Guinea I know we can’t tackle this problem alone – corruption is embedded in the western institutions that have helped bleed our country dry.”

We urge you to read the entire comment, but note how perfectly he sums up his country’s predicament in trying to tackle corruption:

. . . Guinea is incredibly rich in natural resources – with the largest bauxite deposits and the single largest untapped iron ore assets in the world – none of which, until now, the people of Guinea have enjoyed. A small number of offshore companies, aided and abetted by corrupt domestic regimes, bled Guinea’s resources for decades. A slow death facilitated by the network of lawyers, accountants and financial advisers sitting in offices in New York, London, Paris, Geneva, Hong Kong and Singapore.

The author

John Christensen

Trained as a forensic auditor and economist, John has worked in many countries around the world, including a period of working in offshore financial services with Touche Ross & Co. For 11 years he was economic adviser to the government of the British Channel Island of Jersey. In 2003 he became what the Guardian has described as “the unlikely figurehead of a worldwide campaign against tax avoidance.” His research on offshore finance has been widely published in books and academic journals, and John has taken part in many films, television documentaries and radio programmes. John can be contacted on +44 (0) 7979 868302.

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