Nigeria, others lose $1.6bn daily to illicit flows – AfDB

The African Development Bank has revealed that the continent loses about $1.6bn every day to illicit financial flows and profit shifting on the part of multinationals operating in Africa.

This was disclosed by the Chief Economist of AfDB, Kevin Urama, in an exclusive interview

According to the International Monetary Fund, illicit financial flows refer to the movement of money across borders that is illegal in its source (e.g. corruption, smuggling), its transfer (e.g. tax evasion), or its use (e.g. terrorist financing).

For decades, the IMF has played a key role in international efforts to combat these opaque and often destabilising transfers. It also has longstanding concerns with flows that are not strictly illegal but are associated with tax avoidance.

Urama said that Africa was losing more than it was getting back via Foreign Direct Investment and said that the focus of stakeholders should be on blocking the outflow rather than chasing inflows.

He said, “There are so many things that happen on the continent that actually make corruption a big issue. And some estimations show that Africa loses about 248 billion US dollars every year due to corruption. If you add illicit financial flows of over $90bn and add profit shifting; corporates operating in Africa but then maybe have headquarters somewhere else and they find clever accounting ways of legally not paying taxes. In Africa, we are losing about $275bn. When you sum all these up, these are things you can trace through banks, then you find that Africa is losing about $587bn every year.

“That’s about $1.61bn every day. Yet we spend all our time chasing FDI, foreign direct investment, official development assistance, portfolio flows and remittances. All these together during the year we did this study for 2022 was about $174.5bn.  That’s less than three times, I mean what we are losing is three times more than what we are getting from the global market. So how do we engage with the global market? Are we not focusing on the wrong priorities? Because if you ask me if I’m losing almost $600bn, I will focus on how not to lose it instead of going to get more. Tackling it, is what we are doing.