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Still, the London summit managed to get broad support for initiatives to fight bribery across countries — including and commercial activities and sporting events.

“The kind of discussion that took place is a demonstration of growing concern around the world about the impacts of corruption — and the pervasiveness of corruption,” Goodale said.

Transparency is important, especially when you’re trying to expose a scourge like corruption.

There is also “the need for countries to begin to do more and more and more about it — and not just (with) companies, but private-sector players, inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations.”

During Thursday’s meeting, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron said his country already requires companies — domestic or foreign — to disclose who benefits financially from their property holdings.

At the same time, Cameron characterized international corruption as “the cancer at the heart of so many problems we need to tackle in our world.”

There were equally strong words from U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who said he was concerned by how corruption has become “pandemic” around the world.

“It is a contributor to terrorism in many different ways and the extremism that we see in the world today comes to no small degree from the utter exasperation that people have with the sense that the system is rigged.”

Although tax evasion and other forms of corruption, such as money laundering, have been a global concern for decades, it has taken the so-called Panama Papers to push these issues to the public forefront.

In the past few weeks, a consortium of international journalists has posted leaked documents with the names used in 200,000 offshore accounts registered by the law firm Mossack Fonseca, based in Panama.

Among the data were tax havens belonging to some well-known business figures and politicians from a wide range of countries.

Financial Post

gisfeld@nationalpost.com

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