When the son of the president Equatorial Guinea, a desperately poor country, starts buying mansions in Florida and top of the range sports cars on an official monthly salary of $7,000, corruption, suggests Charmian Gooch, founder of anti-corruption NGO Global Witness, is probably somewhere in the picture. In a blistering, eye-opening talk (and through several specific examples), she details how global corruption trackers follow the money — to some surprisingly familiar faces in banks, big oil, and the top of government. And it’s not just in countries traditionally associated with corruption – this is a phenomenan that effects everywhere, all over the world.
According to Gooch: “So many of these scandals are hidden in plain sight — they’re down the road in the City of London. They’re in our company boardrooms. They’re in the corridors of power we walk past every day. What we need to do is piece these things together, expose the links and then we can start to break them.” What’s at stake is the fight for the world’s natural resources, says Gooch, a fight that “has robbed the Congo’s people of over $1.3 billion. It’s what’s left Sarawak with only 5 percent of its forests left intact, and it’s the difference between conflict and peace in countries like Afghanistan and Sudan.”
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