The term ‘Money laundering’ is said to have originated from mafia ownership of Laundromats in the US. Gangsters there were earning huge sums in cash by extortion, prostitution, gambling and bootleg liquor. They needed to show a legitimate source for these monies. Money launderers now resort to the use of apparently legitimate commercial transactions to camouflage their laundering activities. There has been an increasing amount of interest of late in commodity...

Somalia is the world's most corrupt nation, according to Transparency International's 2010 Corruption Perception Index. The 2010 CPI shows that nearly three quarters of the 178 countries in the index score below five, on a scale from 0 (perceived to be highly corrupt) to 10 (perceived to have low levels of corruption), indicating a serious corruption problem. New Zealand, Denmark and Singapore are the least corrupt countries in the world, according...

Microcredit lifted 10 million Bangladeshis out of poverty between 1990 and 2008, according to a report. The work of Grameen Bank and others helped many families to raise their income above $1.25 a day, said the US-based Microcredit Summit Campaign. The study follows recent criticism of microfinance, which works by providing small loans to people to invest in generating their own incomes. Some experts argue the report may have missed the bigger picture. They...

The Supreme Court on Thursday asked the government to widen the scope of its action on black Money beyond the issue of tax evasion, questioning why it had not gone after those who had stashed huge amounts of Money abroad or inquired about the source of the siphoned funds. The Centre explained the difficulty in revealing the names of foreign bank account holders who were in the zone of suspicion for...

The Supreme Court once again confronted the government today over the poverty of information about black Money sent abroad by Indians. "Is it from arms dealing... drug peddling? These are very serious issues," the court observed while reprimanding the government for focusing on tax evasion in its inquiry into black Money. A petition filed by a group of people including former Law Minister Ram Jethmalani asked that the government be...