ISLAMABAD: On Thursday, Prime Minister Imran Khan demanded formally the rich nations to immediately return the stolen assets of poor people of developing countries as Imran khan wants Rick nations. The developing countries are striving hard for their money and the rich have looted the money and filled in their banks.
PM Imran Khan wants Rich Nations to Return Poor’s stolen assets
Imran Khan arranged a meeting with a high-level panel on Financial Accountability, Transparency and Integrity (FACTI) addressing the issues in the ongoing United Nations General Assembly session. He urged the international community to take firm decisions to stop what is happening. He called this agony as ‘bleeding of the poor and developing countries.’
The Prime Minister Office called the FACTI panel to present an interim report, which showed major gaps in implementation and also identified flaws in the system of the existing international frameworks for tax cooperation, defects in anti-corruption, and anti-money laundering system.
Imran said Pakistan is impressed by Nigeria and Norway to establish a panel on international financial accountability and that resulted in addition of billions of dollars in their country’s assets that illicitly flew out each year.
The prime minister pointed out that his government has come up with a strong idea to fight against this menace.
He informed the public that the FACTI panel report said
- $1 trillion was taken out each year by the white-collar criminals,
- $20-40 billion is collected in form of bribes by these corrupt white-collar criminals;
- $7 trillion of the country’s stolen assets are landed in the safe tax haven destinations;
- $500-600 billion was lost each year in tax avoidance by multinational companies.
The Prime minister wants the stolen assets of developing countries, collected through corruption, bribery, and other crimes must be returned immediately.
The looted money from developing countries is deposited in haven destinations. Their authorities must impose criminal and financial penalties on their financial institutions who receive and utilise such money and assets.
The accountants, lawyers, and other intermediaries must also be held accountable for the corruption and bribery as they didn’t monitor the process. The foreign companies’ owner’s must be revealed who accepted the money from corruption by the affected country’s government.
Multinational corporations that allegedly do profit-shifting to avoid taxation must have a global minimum corporate tax to prevent this act. The tax should be imposed on digital transactions where the revenues are generated.
The UN should set up a mechanism to measure illicit financial flows to ensure coherence, consistency, and equity in the work of official and non-official bodies.
Imran Khan warned “Unless these steps are taken, the difference between the rich and poor countries will keep growing. The existing migration crisis will be dwarfed by what will happen in future if the gulf keeps growing.”
He also mentioned the recession faced by the poor countries after the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world. Around one billion people which is 15% of the world’s population faced shortage of resources and poverty, unemployment, and difficulty in survival. Poverty is the worst of global recession in the period of pandemic. Imran Khan said ‘we have been able to control the virus through our strategy of smart lockdowns’.
PM highlighted ‘My government has done its utmost to shield the poor and the vulnerable. Despite our financial difficulties, we implemented a $1.25 billion package to deliver emergency cash to over 15 million families, covering over 100 million people. Ehsas program is also launched to help overcome poverty in Pakistan’s history.’
He also aims to reduce poverty from 24.3 percent to 19 percent by 2023. During the pandemic, the rich countries have trivialized $10 trillion whereas the poor countries are struggling to arrange a small fraction of $2.5 trillion they need.
Financial inequality should be treated in the world and exploitation of resources of poor countries must be stopped. Financial stability should be provided to the developing countries through fair structure of finance, production and trade. Stolen assets should be returned to the countries of their origin.