Indians vote in key third phase

Our office has been following the Indian elections very closely in the past few weeks. Both main parties, Congress and the BJP, have been citing a report detailing the amount of money lost from developing countries through illicit capital flight that was published by my office (Global Financial Integrity) in January. Under the microscope of the financial crisis, leaders of both parties have pledged to immediately recover the $22-27 billion that is shuttled out of India and into the shadow economy every year.
This promise, like the promises of Obama, Brown, Sarkozy and Merkel at the G20, is unlikely to come to fruition. World leaders can take steps to reform the shadow system by placing stricter controls on tax havens and tax evasion, but recovering the billions of dollars lost to capital flight from both developing and developed countries will be a much harder process than it sounds.