President General Pervez Musharraf voiced a common public complaint when he said at the concluding session of an international conference on the UN Convention Against Corruption in Islamabad on Thursday that western banks are flourishing on the money looted by developing countries' corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen.
He urged the developed countries to "stop this loot money laundering in western banks through legislation and UN resolutions." Describing the practice as the "main source of corruption in the developing countries, he demanded: "Give billions of dollars back to us. No one should be allowed to take billions of dollars away. That is the biggest relief that the developed world can give to the developing countries."
Indeed over the years, as regularly reported by the Western media, many of the Third World leaders, most infamous among them being the Philippines' Morcos and the Congolese dictator Mobutu, have been stealing billions out of the public money to stash it away in secret bank accounts abroad while majority of their peoples lived in abject poverty and deprivation.
There can be no justification why such stolen money should not be returned to its rightful owners.
Unfortunately, the western countries have, so far, been refusing to comply with requests from countries like Pakistan to track down and repatriate ill-gotten money, citing legal hindrances.
Hence, the President's call for international legislation to help the developing countries to have their looted wealth returned to them. As a matter of fact, for several years now, after the laundering of drug related money became a big issue in the developed countries, they enacted laws that prevented their banks from laundering drug money.
Encouraged by the idea, some time back, Pakistan had proposed to OECD countries that the same law may be extended to cover the ill-gotten wealth that many corrupt leaders from Third World countries kept in Western banks. But the plea did not move the conscience of any of the European governments. Once again, when the issue of terrorists' funding surfaced in the western countries, they moved quickly to put in place stringent legislation and practical measures to freeze the accounts of all individuals as well as organisations suspected of providing financial support to those believed to have terrorist links.
Help was also sought from and given by Muslim countries, including Pakistan, in plugging the informal channels that were traditionally used by their nationals living abroad for money transmissions.
It is obvious from these examples that when it comes to their own interests the western countries not only resort to necessary legislation, they also force others to change their practices. Besides, they have been regularly bemoaning the prevalence of corruption in the Third World countries.
Yet in refusing to do the needful regarding their own banks' handling of corrupt money, the developed nations have actually been encouraging the very corruption they seem to find abhorrent.
It is about time these nations adopted practical measures to end their role in the perpetuation of corruption in the developing countries.
All they have to do is to expand their existing anti-money laundering filters to add, through new legislation, procedures that require their banks to ask foreign depositors the source of their money, and also to provide such information to the governments of these depositors if requested to do so.
It should be possible for governments to send the list of suspected corrupt elements to, say a Swiss bank, and ask for information on their holdings. If these are found to be incompatible with the sources of income of those suspected of corruption, such money should be returned to the country to which it belongs.
That is not asking took much of the developed countries which, when it comes to their own interests, institute new rules and demand complete compliance with them from all to ensure no one uses their institutions to harm their respective societies.
They should act in a spirit of reciprocity and prevent their financial institutions from indulging in practices that are harmful for societies other than their own.