Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has sacked the country’s corruption czar and appointed a new one. Can they turn things around?
Blackrock, the world’s largest money manager, today warned that “resource nationalism” was a growing trend, on the rise globally. Their investment chief for natural resources, Evy Hambro, particularly singled out the regimes of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela as extreme examples of government intervention, ultimately hinderances to foreign investment. “We’re seeing a [...]
Foreign policy used to be a craft practised by diplomats and statesmen. No longer.
TASHKENT – Tuesday, October 18, 2011 – The latest in a series of corruption scandals in Uzbekistan is only a symptom of a much more widespread malaise, experts say. The state news agency carried a report on Tashkent airport last week, saying some of the staff there had been convicted of extortion and forgery. Reports [...]
Sir Richard Branson recently denied a report in a leaked US embassy cable that he bankrolled a diplomatic effort to sweeten the exit of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, writes Alex Duval Smith in the Independent. A confidential memo released by Wikileaks says that in July 2007, Branson was due to hold a secret meeting with South [...]
TBILISI— Free Democrats City Council Vice-Chairman visited the sprawling new Saburtalo headquarters of the Bank of Georgia on Tuesday to send a warning to the monopoly Georgia Water and Power that they had better not raise water prices on hard-pressed Tbilisi citizens. “For more than a month I have been seeking answers about what was [...]
Free Democrats leader Irakli Alasania recently released an open letter addressed to Georgian Prime Minister Nika Gilauri raising questions and requesting guarantees about the Georgian government’s plans for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) of 20-25 percent of the shares of strategically-vital companies. As a party committed to free markets as well as the protection of fundamental [...]
A fifth of the military hardware budget in Russia is stolen by corrupt officials and contractors each year, bleeding the state budget, and undermining the combat readiness of the armed forces, according to Russia’s chief military prosecutor. The allegations, published in a state newspaper on Tuesday, came a week after Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, [...]
Amnesty International and a conglomeration of human rights activists have stated that the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union have betrayed the people of Zimbabwe by ignoring human rights abuses by President Robert Mugabe’s supporters while paying lip service to implementation of political reforms. Amnesty International Africa director Erwin van der Borght [...]
Hundreds of Venezuelans have held a demonstration demanding the government halt expropriations of private companies and condemning its stance toward union protests. Some protesters held signs saying “Free Ruben Gonzalez!” — a union leader jailed on charges stemming from a 2009 strike at the state iron-mining company. The doctrine of Hugo Chavez has long been [...]
