Indian companies are routing tens of billions of dollars through Mauritius each year in a giant tax avoidance scheme

India is changing its tax laws in a bid to introduce greater transparency into its financial transactions with Mauritius. The aim is to stem 'round-tripping' of funds by politicians, businessmen and criminal syndicates, and assuage concerns about the unregulated and 'hot' money which transits through the Mauritian economy and into India. The licit and illicit financial flows from Mauritius account for as much as 90%, or tens of billions of dollars, of foreign direct investment in India each year.

By Patrick Smith, Editor Africa Confidential

There is a worsening crackdown on journalists in many regions of the world, especially Africa, as governments and businesses struggle to deal with harsher economic conditions.

One of the latest victims in Africa is Ngota Ngota Germain, editor of the weekly Cameroon Express, who died in detention on 23 April in Yaoundé's Kodengui gaol. Along with two other journalists, Serge Sabouang and Robert Mintya, Ngota had been investigating allegations of corruption against Secretary General in the Presidency Laurent Esso and the state oil company.

 Six leading human rights and Sudan advocacy groups are keeping the Administration on its toes and have produced a rigorous analysis of leading indicators across nine overarching categories of benchmarks. Its not good.

Vote-fixing in an election lacking any credibility has galvanised opposition in the North and may undermine the ruling party

A beaming President Omer Hassan Ahmed el Beshir waved his stick triumphantly as his victory was announced in Khartoum on 26 April. Yet the ruling National Congress Party faces a succession of challenges after what many African and Western officials call deeply flawed elections - though mainly in private. The divided and formerly supine Northern opposition now looks determined to continue the struggle triggered by the polls.

Being the first Eritrean reporter ever arrested for doing his job is an odd claim to fame: "I was arrested right after I interviewed the U.S. ambassador to Eritrea," said Milkias M. Yohannes now exiled to the US. 

"I was accused of being a CIA spy. From my colleagues who were there with me, one is in jail. We don't know if the other is still alive."

Yohannes spoke at "Truth Teller," a new series of talks featuring reporters in exile taking the stand on the dangers they faced in their home countries run by Reporters Without Borders.

Eritrea, independent since 1993, is now the continent's biggest prison for the press. It ranked last in the latest annual World Press Freedom Index released by Reporters Without Borders.

A lawyer by trade, Yohannes is the founder of Kestedebena, one of the Eritrea's largest independent newspapers until it was shut down during the 2001 government crackdown.

Its a $300,000 scientific grant to be funded and awarded to up to three scientists each year and president Obiang has promised $3 million to the Paris-based U.N. agency to administer the prize during the next five years. The funds ($1.5 million, for awardees the rest to administer the prize) will come from the Obiang Nguema Mbasogo Foundation for the Preservation of Life.

For 30 years  Obiang has distinguished himself with corruption and contempt for human rights and there are concerns that UNESCO will be permanently tainted .

"If there's any way for UNESCO to shoot itself in the foot it's by renting its credibility to President Obiang, whose record of corruption and abuse seems to go against everything the organization supposedly stands for," Kenneth Hurwitz, a lawyer who specializes in anticorruption with the Open Society Justice Initiative, told Colum Lynch's excellent  Foreign Policy blog | Turtle Bay.

He enthuses that some of the best places for economic growth in Africa are the regions emerging from conflict. He cites places like Southern Sudan, where the diaspora has been harnessed to invest and help guarantee that investments do not simply vanish into thin air. PeaceDiv.com

Collier wasn't invited to talk about threats to the burgeoning African renaissance from the continent's authoritarian leaders, ethnic conflict, the spread of internet censorship, the vicious crackdowns on freedom of expression and the narrowing space for civil society in many countries etc. He was there to make the case that Africa is booming and he pointed out that  experienced European and American investors (who lost money in the last African commodities boom, are missing the boat this time).

Chatting afterwards he dismissed as overblown, the fears that the Chinese driven investment boom, (vast amounts of money without strings attached for transparency, human rights, environment) was such a bad thing: "Something is better than nothing in many of these countries..." he told me.

"I was surprised to see the signs of hunger everywhere" in Ethiopia, writes Helen Epstein in a penetrating analysis published by the New York Review of Books.

" There were babies with kwashiorkor, a disease caused by malnutrition, which I'd assumed occurred only in war zones. Many of the older children were clearly stunted and some women were so deficient in iodine they had goiters the size of cannonballs."

I SPENT March with a delegation of activists, entrepreneurs and policy wonks roaming western, southern and eastern Africa trying very hard to listen -- always hard for a big-mouthed Irishman. With duct tape over my gob, I was able to pick up some interesting melody lines everywhere from palace to pavement ...
Despite the almost deafening roar of excitement about Africa's hosting of soccer's World Cup this summer, we managed to hear a surprising thing. Harmony ... flowing from two sides that in the past have often been discordant: Africa's emerging entrepreneurial class and its civil-society activists.

•  Regime gains dubious legitimacy - but don't expect democracy any time soon
• West treats regime's rigged victory as a down-payment on a Southern referendum

Long before voting started on 11 April, it was clear that the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) in Khartoum would maintain its iron grip on power and that interested governments would accept this, despite the widespread evidence of fraud produced by Sudanese and foreign observers alike (AC Vol 51 No 7). The opposition decision to boycott spoiled the plan.

For Khartoum, internationally accepted elections would counter the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omer Hassan Ahmed el Beshir. For Western governments, the elections were an essential building block in an orchestrated peace process which would culminate in next year's referendum on independence for Southern Sudan.