Tuesday, September 28, 2010

'Another US recession likely'

NEW YORK: University professor Nouriel Roubini said there's a high probability of another recession in the US, with Japan's outlook anemic, underscoring risks to the global recovery.

China, the world's fastest-growing major economy, may face greater headwinds should there be weak growth in the US and Europe, Roubini said in Kuala Lumpur on Monday, where he is attending a conference. "Second-quarter GDP figures for the US are likely to be revised lower after June real-estate numbers," he added.

Austerity measures to cut debt in advanced nations are hurting consumer and business confidence and households in some of the largest economies are holding back spending. "Emerging economies may have to get used to relying on domestic demand in a period of subdued growth for developed countries," Roubini said. "We know the H2 of the year is going to be worse than the first half of the year because of the tailwinds to growth from the fiscal stimulus turning into austerity," he said.

Source: - The Times of India

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Vatican Bank head in money laundering probe

ROME: The head of the Vatican bank is under investigation for suspected money laundering and police have frozen 23 million euros ($30.21 million) of its funds, Italian judicial sources said on Tuesday. Neither Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, who has been at the helm of the bank for a year, nor the Vatican spokesman would comment immediately on the case, which involves alleged violations of European Union money laundering regulations.

The sources said Gotti Tedeschi and another executive of the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), as the bank is officially known, had been put under investigation by Rome magistrates Nello Rossi and Stefano Fava. The sources said Italy's financial police had preventively frozen 23 million euros of the IOR's funds in an account in an Italian bank in Rome.

Two recent transfers from an IOR account in the Italian bank were deemed suspicious by financial police and blocked. One was a transfer of 20 million euros to a German branch of a U.S. bank and another of 3 million euros to an Italian bank. Gotti Tedeschi, a devout Catholic who has taught financial ethics at the Catholic University of Milan, is a close adviser to Treasury Minister Giulio Tremonti. He is currently also head of an Italian unit of the Spanish Banco Santander, according to its website, and serves on the board of several major Italian banks.

The IOR principally manages funds for the Vatican and religious institutions around the world, such as charity organisations and religious ordes of priests and nuns. It was involved in a worldwide scandal in 1982 when it was embroiled in the fraudulent bankruptcy of Banco Ambrosiano, then Italy's largest private bank. The IOR held a small stake in Ambrosiano, whose president Roberto Calvi was found hanged under London's Blackfriars Bridge the same year. Several investigations failed to determine whether Calvi, known as God's Banker, had been killed or committed suicide. At the time the IOR was headed by American Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, who died in Arizona in 2006. The Vatican denied any responsibility for the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano but made what it called a "goodwill payment" of $250 million to Ambrosiano creditors.

Source: The Times of India, Sept 21,2010

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Violence against whistleblowers in India prompts calls for laws to protect them

IN NAYAKANPETTAI, INDIA When police found Vaidyalingam Balasubramanyam's body dumped beside a road in this southern Indian village recently, his family said that telling the truth had cost him his life. The hand-loom weaver turned whistleblower had been fighting corruption in the local weavers' cooperative for the past three years.


"We suspect some people kidnapped him, forced open his mouth to pour in poison or pesticide and threw him out of a moving vehicle," said his son Shanmugan Vel, 25 , as he sat on the floor next to his father's framed, garlanded photograph at his home in the sari-weaving district of Kancheepuram, in Tamil Nadu state. "My father spent all his time investigating the office files for corrupt practices. He sent dozens of complaints to the top officials and leaders."


His father had been warned of the risks he was running, Vel said, but had responded that the documents "contained the explosive truth that will clean up the system."
Eleven people have been killed or found dead in mysterious circumstances in India this year after exposing corruption in schools and public utilities, illegal mining and unauthorized water and electricity hookups, according to activist groups.


Hundreds of others have been attacked, threatened or harassed for similar crusades. In July, about 500 whistleblowers marched in New Delhi to protest the deaths and demand effective anti-corruption and whistleblower-protection legislation in a country where graft is more the norm than the exception.


The demand for such a law began six years ago after a national outcry over the killing of a 30-year-old engineer who had exposed a corruption scandal in highway construction.


Last month, the Indian government finally introduced landmark draft legislation - titled the Public Interest Disclosure and Protection to Persons Making the Disclosures Bill - that proposes a system for dealing with corruption allegations and a three-year jail term for officials who disclose whistleblowers' identities.
"It has been felt that the persons who report the corruption or willful misuse of power or willful misuse of discretion, which causes demonstrable loss to the government . . . need statutory protection," said Prithviraj Chavan, minister of state for personnel, public grievances and pensions, while introducing the bill.
Despite recent rapid economic growth, the expansion of the middle class and the spread of education and mass media, India was ranked 84th out of 180 countries last year in the annual corruption perception survey conducted by the global watchdog Transparency International. Of the various Indian departments analyzed, the police force emerged as the biggest offenders.


Since 2005, anti-corruption crusaders have used a law mandating the right to information to access official files and expose malfeasance. Balasubramanyam had collected hundreds of official documents indicating that a single family held a monopoly over the cooperative management, according to Vel, who showed a reporter photocopies of the documents. The files also showed evidence of embezzlement.


"Due to heavy rainfall last year, the government sent compensation money to hand-loom weavers. But I did not get any of it, even though the records in the cooperative showed that all the weavers had been paid," said Sukha Lingam, 40, a weaver in Nayakanpettai. "The managers ate up all the money meant for the poor."
Balasubramanyan always carried with him a yellow cloth bag containing files he had accessed. The bag is now missing. The police registered a case of "suspicious death" after his killing and sent his body for examination.


Analysts say public intolerance of corruption has grown in recent years, spurring the push for stronger laws to combat it - but also inviting violent reprisals.
"For many decades, Indians kept saying, 'What can we do?' But now corruption has reached a level that it is difficult to look the other way," said Sumaira Abdulaali, a member of the Movement Against Intimidation, Threat and Revenge against Activists, an independent coalition. "When illegal activities take place on such a major scale, then we can be certain that the entire system of politicians, officials, police and criminals are mixed up in it."


Many activists say, however, that the new whistleblower bill is still inadequate. It covers only the government bureaucracy and not the military or the corporate sector. It is silent on those exposing corrupt politicians. The bill empowers a body called the Central Vigilance Commission to investigate cases, but the government is not bound to follow its recommendations. It also says anonymous complaints will not be accepted.


"It is just a showpiece legislation," said Arvind Kejriwal, head of Parivartan, a New Delhi-based group that campaigns for transparency. "The entire emphasis of the bill is in keeping the name of the whistleblower a secret. That is the last concern of the people who blow the whistle. What they want is swift, guaranteed investigation and action on their complaint so that they are not vulnerable to physical threats and professional harassment."


The ministry has invited activists to comment on the draft legislation by the end of September.


Last month, the Delhi High Court ordered the government to pay compensation to Mahendra Kumar Tyagi, 65, who was harassed at work for complaining against his bosses' corrupt activities in the state-owned oil company. For 10 years, Tyagi said, nobody spoke to him at the office and he received no promotion.


"I was made an outcast and a prisoner in my office cubicle. It was like slow poisoning," Tyagi recalled.


Last month's court order hailed him as "courageous."
"I have been vindicated," he said. "But at what cost? I ruined my life, my health and my peace of mind. Today I tell my son, 'Don't be honest. You will get nothing but trouble. In India, the honest are punished, the corrupt are rewarded.' "

Source: The Washington Post, By Rama Lakshmi, Dt. September 11, 2010

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Attack on China whistleblower shows risk of unveiling corruption, fraud

China whistleblower Fang Zhouzi was mugged after his criticism of a Chinese hospital. 'I’ve had threatening phone calls and e-mails before, but this was the first time I have been attacked,' he says.

Beijing

A bungled attack on a whistleblower famous for his exposés of fraud and pseudoscience has drawn fresh attention to the vexed issues of academic dishonesty and popular gullibility in China.

Fang Zhouzi, a popular science writer and blogger, was assaulted by two men as he walked to his Beijing home Sunday evening; one sprayed a chemical in his face, the other beat him with a hammer. He was only slightly injured and was released from hospital later Sunday night.

“I’ve had threatening phone calls and e-mails before, but this was the first time I have been attacked,” Mr. Fang said in a telephone interview.

The anticorruption activist has been involved recently in a number of high profile cases, most notably questioning a claim by a former president of Microsoft China that he had earned his PhD from the prestigious California Institute of Technology.

Tang Jun, who had listed his degree as an achievement in a book recounting his success in business, later acknowledged that his PhD actually came from Pacific Western University in California. That institution was a diploma mill that sold academic credentials and required no classroom instruction, according to a 2004 report by the US Government Accountability Office.

In a number of recent blog posts, Fang also poured skepticism on celebrity Taoist sage Li Yi, who claims extraordinary feats of prowess and counts pop stars and business luminaries among his disciples. Mr. Li stepped down from his public positions Saturday, in the wake of accusations against him of rape and tax evasion.
Who attacked Fang?

Fang’s lawyer, Peng Jian, said he thought the attack was most likely ordered by a private hospital in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, which specializes in a controversial operation on the nervous system to control urinary incontinence.

A Chinese journalist who had written an article raising doubts about the operation’s efficacy was assaulted last June. Fang, in a blog posted three weeks ago, cited an article in a US magazine criticizing the operation. A court in Zhengzhou is due later this month to hear a malpractice suit brought by Mr. Peng against the hospital on behalf of a group of patients claiming the operation did them more harm than good.
More to be done on fraud in China

Last year the Ministry of Education urged universities to weed out plagiarists from their faculties. This meant reporting plagiarists, denying them research funding, sacking them, and possibly suing them. The measures were designed to “keep the academic field clean,” an official said at the time.

New scandals this year however, including plagiarism accusations against an internationally respected political science scholar Wang Hui and the dismissal of a top professor of energy and power studies found guilty of over 30 cases of plagiarism, led the state-owned “China Daily” to editorialize last month that “it is by now evident that the nation needs better regulations to counter the practice in academia.”

"The government is not doing enough," agrees Fang.

Academia is not the only field to be plagued by plagiarism, nor the only one reluctant to face up to it. Last January, Sang Yuzhu, the winner of China’s highest photography award, was stripped of his medal and his post in the Chinese Photographers’ Association when it was shown he had submitted other photographers’ work to the competition.

The CPA did not acknowledge the plagiarism, however. Officially he was accused only of “joint collaboration” with the two other photographers, in violation of competition rules.

Source: The Christian Science Monitor

Retail fraud management is need of the hour

India, for the fourth time in five years, has been ranked as the most attractive country for retail investment among 30 emerging markets, according to the Eighth Annual Global Retail Development Index (GRDI) 2009 by A T Kearney. Retail accounts for a significant portion of the country’s GDP, with organised retail accounting for around 5% of the total retail market. Organised retail is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20–30% over the next few years.


However, with rapid growth in the sector, the associated perils and issues are also coming to the forefront. The shrinkage or fraud in retail is a key issue that is becoming a cause of concern for Indian retailers. Shrinkage is the “loss in inventory on account of a combination of employee theft, shoplifting, vendor fraud and administrative error.”


According to the Global Retail Theft Barometer (GRTB) 2009, India recorded a shrinkage of 3.2% of the total size of the country's retail industry (including the unorganised sector), amounting to about $2.6 billion. This is very high compared to other global markets like the US (1.6%), the UK (1.4%), and China (1.1%). In India, customer theft contributed around 44.7% of shrinkage losses, employee theft contributed 23.7%, as compared with 8.4% by suppliers/vendors, while administrative errors accounted for the rest.


In India, thefts are typically targeted on small and easily-concealed, expensive and branded items that have considerable popular appeal and are easily re–sellable such as electronic games, DVDs, iPods/MP3 players, clothing, cosmetics, perfumes and alcohol. The designer garments topped the list of things stolen in 2009.


In the past, it has been observed that hypermarkets, departmental stores and books & music formats experience high inventory losses because of the size of their products and product value. In mom-and-pop stores, the owners do not feel the impact as it is believed that manning the store themselves is vigilant enough. In large-format stores, however, it is difficult to check as wares are spread out.


Various categories of fraud constitute a major component of the shrinkage. Among the factors responsible for shrinkage losses, employees and vendors are critical factors that need to be managed by retailers. Employees may resort to direct theft, under invoicing in collusion with customers, stealing cash, etc., whereas vendors can under-deliver in terms of number, size or quality of items as against the bill invoice.


The growing motivation among employees to lead a luxurious life, high reliance on skilled resources, thereby leading to weaker internal controls, and overdependence on existing systems and processes give rise to increased risk of fraud in retail sector. While marketing fraud, inventory theft and return fraud (observed in product exchanges) are common instances of fraud in the sector, other frauds such as cash skimming and skim and fall also exist.


With potential risks and marked instances of fraud and theft, it is imperative for retail companies to:

a. Adopt robust internal controls backed by strong data analytics to mitigate key fraud risks and to raise red flags at early stages.

b. Devise a whistle blower policy allowing employees, customers and vendors to report malpractices directly to the management.

c. Determine policies pertaining to prevention, detection and investigation of frauds and to have action plans defined for conducting investigation if an incident occurs.

d. Set up dedicated team–internal/external–to handle stock checks at each of the stores periodically.

e. Collate an end-to-end study of material movement from source to destination, including counter checks and cross tallying.


With rising challenges in the sector, the key to success is staying competitive without compromising on the quality of services. Cost effectiveness is necessary to achieve this, and it is here where an effective fraud risk management will help companies to identify potential leakage points and opportunities to save


Source: Arpinder Singh, Partner & National Leader & Anurag Kashyap, Associate Director - Fraud, Investigation and Dispute Services, E&Y published in Economic Times dt. Sept 7, 2010