Money flowing out of Afghanistan

Telegraph:

The sum haemorrhaging from one of the poorest countries in the world has led officials to believe the money is from plundered Western aid projects and security or reconstruction contracts, it has been reported.

Proceeds from the country's rampant opium and heroin businesses also account for part of the sum, which is more than the Afghan government's entire tax revenue.

The money is packed in suitcases or even stacked on pallets and flown mainly to Dubai.

Customs records for legally declared money leaving the airport showed £2.1 billion left between since the start of 2007 and the end of February 2010.

The declared cash is likely to be a fraction of what actually leaves the country. Customs records are incomplete and money is also smuggled out unregistered.

In December The Daily Telegraph reported that the Afghan ministry of finance estimated £6m a day was being smuggled out.

Afghanistan's endemic corruption and Hamid Karzai's failure to tackle the problem have angered his western backers who are pouring in money to defeat the Taliban insurgency.

Nato spent more than £10bn in Afghanistan alone last year.

Afghanistan's gross domestic product was only £8bn in 2008.

...

In a post below I note that the Karzai administration is not cooperating with anti corruption cops trying to find out who is making off with the money and where they got it. This is a situation that should not be tolerated and those who refused to cooperate should be charged with obstruction of justice.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t...
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more