The United Nations High-Level Panel on International Financial Accountability, Transparency and Integrity for Achieving the 2030 Agenda (FACTI Panel) has called for global support to strengthen financial integrity for sustainable development.
This call is among the 14 recommendations made by the UN panel at the launch of its new report titled “Financial Integrity for Sustainable Development”.
The panel urged governments across the world to create robust and coordinated national governance mechanisms that efficiently reinforce financial integrity for sustainable development.
In addition, the FACTI Panel asked governments to publish national reviews evaluating their own performance as part of measures to improve financial integrity, while also recommending the establishment of an inclusive and legitimate global coordination mechanism at United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).
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The inclusive and legitimate global coordination mechanism, it noted, will address financial integrity on a systemic level.
The Panel, in the newly released report, urged governments to redirect the trillions of dollars recovered from curbing tax abuse, corruption and money-laundering to financing critical action on the climate crisis, COVID-19 recovery and extreme poverty.
In its 14 recommendations, the FACTI Panel also outlined an ambitious set of measures to reform, redesign and revitalize the global architecture, so it can effectively foster financial integrity for sustainable development.
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The recommendations by the high-level body include building on existing structures and creating an inclusive inter-governmental body on tax matters under the United Nations among others.
Speaking at the virtual launch of the report, Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan advocated concrete steps to stem the flow of illicit money from developing countries to tax havens and to ensure the return of stolen assets, saying that it could have a “transformational impact on their development prospects”.
“These steps should include a commitment by countries that were currently acting as tax havens to immediately and unconditionally return all foreign assets that are shown to be stolen or whose legitimacy cannot be explained.
“The United Nations should initiate negotiations on the new international tax corporation and anti-money laundering legal instruments like the Convention on Corruption, adopt common principles identified by the FACTI panel that will apply to all financial transactions and establish a UN coordination, adjudication and mediation mechanism on illicit financial flows,” Khan said.
The objective of the FACTI Panel is to contribute to the overall efforts undertaken by Member-States to implement the ambitious and transformational vision of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The Panel is co-chaired by former Prime Minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki and former President of Lithuania, Dalia Grybauskaitė.
Members of the Panel include: Chairman of Nigeria’s Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), Prof. Bolaji Owasanoye; Annet Wanyana Oguttu, Benedicte Schilbred Fasmer, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Irene Ovonji-Odida, José Antonio Ocampo, Karim Daher, Magdalena Sepúlveda, Manorma Soeknandan, Shahid Hafiz Kardar, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Tarisa Watanagase, Thomas Stelzer, Yu Yongding and Yury Fedotov.
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