Guinea: A slow death facilitated by lawyers, accountants and financial advisers

Alpha Condé

The Guardian has posted a comment from Guinean President, Alpha Condé, currently in Davos at the 2014 World Economic Forum.  He gets straight to business in his first paragraph: “As president of Guinea I know we can’t tackle this problem alone – corruption is embedded in the western institutions that have helped bleed our country dry.”

We urge you to read the entire comment, but note how perfectly he sums up his country’s predicament in trying to tackle corruption:

. . . Guinea is incredibly rich in natural resources – with the largest bauxite deposits and the single largest untapped iron ore assets in the world – none of which, until now, the people of Guinea have enjoyed. A small number of offshore companies, aided and abetted by corrupt domestic regimes, bled Guinea’s resources for decades. A slow death facilitated by the network of lawyers, accountants and financial advisers sitting in offices in New York, London, Paris, Geneva, Hong Kong and Singapore.