The United Nations is able to put a price tag on political corruption - estimating that up to $1.6 trillion in public assets move across borders each year through networks such as money laundering or into secret holdings. The much harder question is how to reclaim the black funds and monitor nations to make sure public money stays in the treasuries.
This is the challenge for hundreds of envoys from the United Nations, World Bank and government watchdog groups in meetings beginning Monday in Qatar's capital, Doha. The five-day gathering is the latest attempt to give some enforcement authority to a four-year-old UN anti-corruption pact backed by 141 nations, from the United States and many Western nations to countries with deep-rooted corruption such as Afghanistan and Zimbabwe.
On the top of the agenda: seeking measures to hunt down diverted public funds and develop a monitoring system to check the level of financial transparency in each nation, particularly in the developing world. But hopes for far-reaching accords appear muted. Two similar meetings in past years have failed to expand the powers under the UN's anti-corruption convention, which is the world body's most ambitious attempt to target fiscal misdeeds by political leaders and officials. Some nations, including China and Iran, resist having independent monitors pore through their books.
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