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afrol.com/AENS, 13 March - African anti-corruption campaigners on Tuesday urged the United Nations to draft an international treaty expediting the recovery and repatriation of wealth stolen from developing countries and transferred abroad. Transparency International said in a statement on Tuesday that an estimated US$ 30 billion had been misappropriated from some of the world's poorest countries, by corrupt politicians, soldiers, and business people over the past two decades and was being kept abroad in the form of cash, stocks and bonds, real estate and other assets. TI pointed out that the Nigerian government had managed to recover an estimated US$ 750 million that was illegally appropriated by the Abacha military regime and insisted that it was therefore possible to trace and recover other wealth that had been stolen from national treasuries. TI representatives from 11 African countries said in a statement on Tuesday that the UN should therefore force transnational banks to open their accounts for inspection in cases of suspected corruption or other illegal activity. The demands, contained in the Nyanga Declaration adopted in Zimbabwe last week, also calls for "the sealing of all known loopholes, requiring banks to open their books for inspection where there is reasonable cause to suspect illegal activity, and mandatory liquidation and repatriation of assets known to have been corruptly acquired". The Declaration also calls on the Organisation of African Unity to "take a leadership role in representing the interests of Africa with regard to the return of Africa's stolen wealth wherever it may be found on the globe. The OAU should, as a first step, adopt all reasonable measures to prevent the illegal appropriation and transfer of moneys from Africa's treasuries, TI said. The Nyanga Declaration follows TI's drafting of the groundbreaking Wolfsberg Anti-Money Laundering Principles with 11 major international banks last year in an attempt to develop new ethical business guidelines for international private banks. The Wolfsberg Principles state that "bank policy will be to prevent the use of its world-wide operations for criminal purposes. The bank will endeavour to accept only those clients whose source of wealth and funds can be reasonably established to be legitimate." The principles, signed on October 30, 2000, also deal with the identification and follow-up of unusual or suspicious activities. TI's African representatives expressed their support for the Wolfsberg Principles as "a first step towards stopping the movement of illicit wealth" on Tuesday. TI added, however, that national governments were also obliged to strengthen international and national law to provide stringent measures to prevent the money laundering of any kind. Pointing out that similar laws already existed to combat the international drug trade, TI called on international law enforcement agencies to proactively recover the proceeds of other organised crime involving corrupt officials or politicians. The Nyanga Declaration was formally adopted by TI representatives from Botswana, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. By Justin Arenstein, African Eye News Service (AENS)
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