Flip the script: stop seeing corruption as a problem affecting exclusively, or mostly, developing countries, and instead recognise and investigate the role of Western financial centres as integral in the puzzle – acknowledging corruption as a global issue. This sentiment, in its various nuances, was reiterated by all the participants to the inaugural workshop of the Testing and evidencing compliance with beneficial ownership checks project, carried out in the frame of the Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence (GI-ACE) research programme, in Oxford, on 9 October 2019. While this relatively simple message is now widely accepted by all serious commentators, having even received some attention with the wider public because of books such as Treasure Islands, Moneyland and the TV series From Russia with Cash, we are still far …

Recent years have brought about improvements in corporate transparency regarding content takedown requests by governments. Google and Twitter, for instance, specify details of content takedowns in their transparency reports, allowing to identify which government authority demanded what content to be removed and why. Other takedowns can be demanded by private actors on copyright grounds for instance. The Lumen database gives more insight into takedowns of such nature. However, little to almost no transparency exists when it comes to mobile app stores. Mobile app stores are a sort of marketplace on phones and allow for the download of health, productivity, privacy, and other apps. These marketplaces are very opaque, and it is a challenge to know why an app was removed. …