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On the Trail of Capital Flight from
Africa: The Takers and the Enablers

Léonce Ndikumana (Editor)
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On the Trail of Capital Flight from Africa
On the Trail of Capital
Flight from Africa
The Takers and the Enablers
Edited by
LÉ ONC E N DI K UM A NA
and
JAM E S K . B OYCE
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© the several contributors 2022
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021942613
ISBN 978–0–19–885272–8
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198852728.001.0001
Printed and bound in the UK by
TJ Books Limited
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Acknowledgements
We owe a sincere debt of gratitude to the many individuals and institutions who
contributed directly and indirectly to bring this book to completion. We especially
appreciate the valuable contributions from experts and policy makers in Angola,
Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, and elsewhere—notably Portugal, France, and the
UK—who donated their time and knowledge, as well as providing valuable data
and qualitative information to the authors of the case studies. Their assistance is
greatly appreciated.
We are grateful to the Open Society Foundations (OSF) for a grant that sup-
ported this project, and to the Freidrich Ebert Stiftung in Berlin and the Political
Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for valu-
able additional support.
Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce
Amherst, Massachusetts
January 2022
List of Figures
3.1. Angola 38
4.1. Map of major cacao areas 101
4.2. Top cacao producers 104
4.3. Breakdown of the price of a milk chocolate bar sold in Europe 107
5.1. Capital flight from South Africa: 5-year totals 152
5.2. Domestic saving and investment, 1960–2018 160
5.3. Foreign direct investment: cumulative inward, outward, and net inflows by
decade 166
5.4. The network of enablers 182
6.1. The money laundering “value” proposition 195
6.2a. Procedure for general merchandise (excluding oil and gas) exports in
Nigeria 214
6.2b. Documentation required for general merchandise (excluding oil and gas)
exports in Nigeria 215
6.2c. Exporter response to institutions (incentive structure) governing exports of
general merchandise (excluding oil and gas) in Nigeria 216
List of Tables
2.1. Capital flight from Angola 18

2.2. Capital flight from Côte d’Ivoire 19
2.3. Cocoa export misinvoicing in Côte d’Ivoire, 2000–2018 20
2.4. Capital flight from South Africa 21
2.5. Non-monetary gold export misinvoicing in South Africa, 2000–2018 22
2.6. Platinum export misinvoicing in South Africa, 2001–2018 23
2.7. Estimates of offshore wealth as stock of capital flight 27
5.1. Non-monetary gold exports in South Africa, 2000–2018 154
5.2. External debt burden indicators in South Africa, 1994–2018 155
5.3. Private wealth and number of High Net Worth Individuals, 2018 157
5.4. Sample list of transactions labelled as “inter-company loans” at Bank
of Baroda, 2007–2017 179
6.1. Resource intensity in selected African economies 210
6.2. Types of export certificates in Nigeria’s export regime 212
6.3. Description of general merchandise import process in Nigeria 219
6.4. Description of general merchandise import clearing sub-process in Nigeria 221
List of Acronyms
ACE Audit Contrôle et Expertise

ADM Archer Daniels Midland Company
AMCU Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union
AML Anti-money laundering
ANAPROCI Association Nationale des Producteurs de Café-Cacao de Côte d’Ivoire
[National Association of Coffee and Cocoa Producers of Ivory Coast]
ANC African National Congress
API American Petroleum Institute
B/L bill of lading
BAI Banco Africano de Investimentos
BASIC Bureau for the Appraisal of Social Impacts for Citizen Information
BCEAO Banque Centrale des États de l’Afrique de l’Ouest [Central Bank of West
African States]
BdP Banco de Portugal
BEE Black Economic Empowerment
BES Banco Espı́rito Santo
BESA Banco Espı́rito Santo Angola
BIS Bank for International Settlements
BNA Banco Nacional de Angola
BNI Banque Nationale d’Investissement [National Investment Bank]
BoP balance of payments
BWIs Bretton Woods Institutions
CAA Caisse Autonome d’Amortissement [Autonomous Amortization Fund]
CAISTAB Caisse de Stabilsation et de Soutien des Prix des Produits Agricoles
[Stabilization and Price Support Fund for Agricultural Products]
CBS Statistics Netherlands
CCC Conseil Café-Cacao [Cocoa-Coffee Council]
CCHA Compagnie Commerciale Hollando Africaine
CD Certificate of Deposit
CEO Chief Executive Officer
CFA franc Communauté financière d’Afrique franc [franc of the Financial Commu-
nity of Africa]
cif cost, insurance and freight
CIF China International Fund
CIU Customs Inspection Unit
COD Country of Destination
COMD Crude Oil Marketing Department
COO Country of Origin
x list of acronyms
CPC Customs Processing Center

CSA Coal Supply Agreement
DN Debit Note
DOTS Direction of Trade Statistics
DPR Department of Petroleum Resources
DRC Democratic Republic of Congo
DTI Data Transmitting Interface
DUS Droit unique de sortie [Single exit duty]
ECOWAS Economic Community of West African States
EFCC Economic and Financial Crimes Commission
EIR Equipment Interchange Report
EU European Union
FCPA Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
FDI Foreign direct investment
FDPCC Fonds de Développement et de Promotion des Activités des Produc-
teurs de Café et de Cacao [Fund for Development and Promotion of the
Activities of Coffee and Cocoa Producers]
FGCC Fonds de Garantie des Coopératives Café et Cacao [Guarantee Fund for
Coffee and Cocoa Cooperatives]
FILOCOM Fichier des Logements par Communes [Housing Records by Commune]
FN Forces Nouvelles [New Forces]
fob free on board
FPI Front Patriotique Ivoirien [Ivorian Patriotic Front]
FPSO Floating production, storage and offtake platform
FRCC Fonds de Régulation du Café et du Cacao [Regulatory Authority for Coffee
and Cocoa]
FT Financial Times
GDP Gross Domestic Product
ICCO International Cocoa Organization
ICIJ International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
IDC Investissement Développement Conseil
IMF International Monetary Fund
IMTS International Merchandise Trade Statistics
IOC Independent oil company
IIP international investment position
IP Intellectual property
ISO International Organization for Standardization
ITIC International Transportation and Insurance Cost
JSE Johannesburg Stock Exchange
JVs Joint ventures
KYC know-your-customer
LSE London Stock Exchange
MPLA Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola
NBER National Bureau of Economic Research
NCS Nigerian Customs Service
list of acronyms xi
NEPC Nigerian Export Promotion Council

NIMASA Nigerian Maritime and Safety Administration Agency
NNPC Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation
NPDC Nigerian Pipeline Development Corporation
OCM Optimum Coal Mine
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
OPEC Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries
OPM Other People’s Money
PAAR Pre-Arrival Assessment Report
PDCI Parti Démocratique de la Côte d’Ivoire [Democratic Party of Ivory Coast]
PEPs Politically Exposed Persons
POS point of sale
PwC PricewaterhouseCoopers
R&D Research and development
RDA Rassemblement Démocratique Africain [African Democratic Party]
RDR Rassemblement des Républicains [Republican Party]
SADC Southern African Development Community
SAIE Société Africaine d’Importation et d’Exportation [African Import-Export
Association]
SARB South African Reserve Bank
SARS South African Revenue Service
SEC US Securities and Exchange Commission
SGD Single Goods Declaration
SIFCA Société Financière de la Côte Africaine [Financial Corporation of the
African Coast]
SITC Standard International Trade Classification
SSA Sub-Saharan Africa
SVDP Special Voluntary Disclosure Program
SYNAP-CI Syndicat National Agricole Pour Le Progrès [National Agricultural Union
for Progress]
TAIS Trans Africa Investment Services
TDO Terminal Delivery Order
UAE United Arab Emirates
UN Comtrade United Nations International Trade Statistics Database
UNCTADstat United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Statistics
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNITA União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola
List of Contributors
Adam Aboobaker, Lecturer in Economics, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

Melvin Ayogu, Professor, Department of Economics, Emory University, USA
James K. Boyce, Senior Fellow, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Mas-
sachusetts Amherst, USA
Jean Merckaert, Director of Action and Advocacy, Secours Catholique-Caritas, France
Karmen Naidoo, Doctoral candidate, Department of Economics, University of Mas-
sachusetts Amherst, USA
Léonce Ndikumana, Distinguished Professor, Department of Economics, University of
Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Nicholas Shaxson, Writer, Journalist, and Investigator, Tax Justice Network, Berlin,
Germany
1
Introduction
Why Care about Capital Flight?
For Africa, the beginning of the twenty-first century marked a turn from a
history of economic stagnation to an era of growth acceleration on the back of
an unprecedented commodity boom. Until the boom was checked by the 2008
global economic crisis, Africa emerged as the world’s fastest-growing region, its
economies branded as “lions on the move” by McKinsey & Company.1 Follow-
ing that crisis, the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) region rebounded and continued to
grow robustly in the century’s second decade at an annual rate of more than 4%.2
Many African countries saw substantial improvements in human development
outcomes, with rising literacy and declining child mortality.
Yet even as African countries witnessed these economic improvements, they
continued to suffer from major outflows of resources, much of it in the form of
illicit capital flight. The problem is not new, but ironically it has accelerated even
as African economies embarked on growth acceleration. We have estimated that
capital flight from African countries since 1970 amounted to $2 trillion, of which
almost $600 billion exited after the turn of the century. If we include the interest
income that would be earned from these outflows, the cumulative amount of pri-
vate wealth held offshore stood at $2.4 trillion by 2018. This was more than three
times higher than the stock of external debts owed by the same countries, making
Africa a “net creditor” to the rest of the world (Ndikumana and Boyce 2021).
The phenomenon of capital fleeing from the continent at a time when it is expe-
riencing a renaissance defies common logic and economic theory, which suggest
that capital should move across borders in pursuit of higher returns to investment.
Growth acceleration and improvements in macroeconomic and political stability
in Africa, as seen in the past two decades, should encourage domestic investment
while reducing incentives for moving private capital abroad. The fact that capital
1 McKinsey Global Institute (2010).

2 IMF, World Economic Outlook database, April 2020 edition, available at https://www.imf.org/
external/pubs/ft/weo/2020/01/weodata/index.aspx (accessed on July 21, 2021).
Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce, Introduction. In: On the Trail of Capital Flight from Africa.
Edited by Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce, Oxford University Press.
© Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce (2022). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198852728.003.0001
2 introduction: why care about capital flight?
nevertheless seems to flow upstream, fleeing Africa towards lower-return markets

abroad, suggests that wealth holders are motivated not by conventional portfo-
lio choice considerations, but by a desire to keep their assets out of sight of the
authorities in their own countries. Indeed, empirical research shows that annual
capital flight is not responsive to differentials in risk-adjusted interest rates bet-
ween African countries and the rest of the world (see, among others, Ndikumana
et al. (2015) and Ndikumana and Boyce (2003)), implying that capital flight is
driven by other factors.
One key motive behind capital flight from Africa may lie in the fact that the
wealth itself was acquired illegally, and therefore needs to be shielded from pros-
ecution for the predicate crimes that generated it. In addition, some of the capital
flight may originate from legally acquired wealth that the owners illicitly transfer
abroad, in contravention of capital controls and foreign exchange regulations, in
order to evade tax on capital gains and interest income or to avoid the risk of asset
capture or nationalization in countries with high political instability.
Capital flight is widespread across the African continent, but it varies signifi-
cantly from country to country, with resource-rich countries being typically more
exposed than their less well-endowed counterparts (Ndikumana and Sarr 2019).
Two key mechanisms of capital flight are the misinvoicing of commodity exports
and the embezzlement of export revenues in state-owned mineral and oil compa-
nies. The association of capital flight with natural resources is one manifestation
of what is sometimes called the “resource curse.” This association appears to be
particularly pronounced in the case of oil-rich countries, which in Africa tend to
be more poorly governed.
The issue is not resource endowments per se, but the quality of governance in
the concerned countries. Lamenting the inadequacy of economic progress in her
country, Liberia’s president Ellen Sirleaf Johnson remarked:
I’ve often said that Liberia is not a poor country, but rather a rich country that has
been poorly managed. The same is true for most of sub-Saharan Africa. Africa’s
crisis was a failure of leadership and management. Sub-Saharan Africa is rich in
resources, talent, and energy and spirit. But it has not been rich in leadership.
It is made up of countries that were poorly managed, and the results have been
disastrous.
(Sirleaf Johnson, 2010, p. 5)
Capital flight can be understood as a result and symptom of an environment that
incentivizes and facilitates the smuggling of domestic assets to offshore havens.
But capital flight is not only a domestic phenomenon “pushed” by features of
the local economic and political order. It is also a global phenomenon “pulled” and
facilitated by institutions and actors in the international economic order. Within
Africa, capital flight is enabled by the failures of legal and regulatory systems to
ndikumana and boyce 3
enforce the rule of law in acquisition of wealth and the transfer of wealth across
borders. Internationally, capital flight is enabled by systematic defects in the global
trading and financial systems that allow transactions and wealth to be shielded
from scrutiny, and facilitated by an elaborate transnational network that includes
banks, lawyers, accountants, and consulting firms. Tackling the problem will re-
quire a global strategy with committed engagement by national, regional, and
global stakeholders.
Why Care about Capital Flight?
Capital flight should be a matter of concern not just for Africans but for the
world at large. In Africa, capital flight undermines domestic resource mobiliza-
tion by eroding the tax base. It undermines government finances directly when the
capital comes from embezzled externally borrowed funds—through the “revolv-
ing door” that links debt and capital flight—and by theft of government revenue
from state-owned enterprises and natural resources (Ndikumana and Boyce 2011).
These leakages come at a heavy cost in terms of poverty reduction and public
investments in health care, education, water and sanitation (Ndikumana 2014,
Nkurunziza 2015). The negative impacts on public services fall disproportionately
on the poor who cannot afford privately provided services at home or abroad.
Meanwhile, the fact that offshore wealth goes untaxed means that the burden
of taxation falls disproportionately on the middle class and domestic businesses
that are unable to hide their assets abroad. These effects exacerbate inequality,
fueling social and political instability arising from the resentment of ordinary
citizens against a system they perceive, with good reason, to be working in the
interest of the economic and political elites in collusion with international ac-
tors operating in an opaque global financial system. As African countries attempt
to design strategies to sustain inclusive economic growth and reduce inequal-
ity, they must integrate combating capital flight as a central element of their
efforts.
The countries that are destinations for flight capital bear serious costs, too. In
the real estate markets of New York, Paris, London, and other global cities, capital
flight inflates prices and rents for the residents. The loopholes and defects in the
international financial architecture that are exploited by capital flight also facili-
tate tax avoidance and tax evasion by corporations and wealthy individuals in rich
countries. Transnational corruption crosses national borders, corroding demo-
cratic governance and undermining legitimate economic activity wherever it goes.
For countries on the receiving end of African capital flight, too, efforts to combat
capital flight are in the interests of everyone apart from enablers who are on the
take.
Why Case Studies?
There is sufficient evidence today to make a compelling case that capital flight is a
problem that deserves serious attention given its magnitude, its deleterious devel-
opmental effects on African economies, and the fact that it seems to be worsening
over time (Ndikumana and Boyce, 2011, 2015; Ndikumana and Boyce, 2021). But
the existing evidence remains inadequate as a basis for formulating effective poli-
cies to prevent further capital flight and induce repatriation of past capital flight.
First, aggregate macroeconomic evidence does not furnish fine-grained, country-
specific information on the mechanisms of capital flight, the institutional contexts
in which it occurs, and the players involved in facilitating it. Second, the existing
literature on capital flight has not paid adequate attention to the destinations of
private wealth accumulated and held offshore and the roles of the banking sector
and public institutions in the destination territories. Third, the literature has not
sufficiently delved into the effects of national and international institutions and
governance on the magnitude and mechanisms of capital flight and the possible
reverse effects of capital flight on governance.
This volume seeks to address these gaps with detailed analysis at the country
level. It aims to provide evidence that can help guide effective policy formulation
on how to combat capital flight from Africa as well as to advance policy-relevant
research on the issue. To do so, the book first presents a quantitative analysis of
capital flight and its drivers in Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, and South Africa. This is
followed by qualitative and institutional analysis for each country to examine the
modus operandi of capital flight; that is, the “who,” “how,” and “where” dimen-
sions of the phenomenon. “Who” refers to major domestic and foreign players;
“how” refers to mechanisms of capital acquisition, transfer, and concealment; and
“where” refers to the destinations of capital flight and to the bilateral transactions
involved.
Why Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, and South Africa?
South Africa and Angola come in second and third position respectively (after
Nigeria) among countries with the biggest outflows of capital flight in Sub-Saharan
Africa; Côte d’Ivoire ranks seventh (Ndikumana and Boyce 2018). These countries
share the common feature of high natural resource endowments that is often cor-
related with capital flight, but they are heterogeneous in terms of history, economic
structure, and institutions in ways that reflect the heterogeneity of the continent.
With the fifth largest economy in Sub-Saharan Africa, Angola is known not
for what it has done with its vast natural resource endowment, but what it has
failed to do with it. The country features prominently in the literature on the
“oil curse” (Hammond 2011, Shaxson 2007), as the discovery and exploitation
of petroleum has suffocated the development of other economic sectors while

profiting the national elite and multinational oil companies. This has been ac-
complished notably through establishment of a powerful parastatal to manage oil,
Sonangol, which observers have described as “an island of competence thriving in
tandem with the implosion of most other Angolan state institutions” (Soares de
Oliveira 2007). Angola’s natural resources also played a critical role in motivating
and financing the country’s devastating civil war (Frynas and Wood 2001). An-
gola’s “paradox of plenty,” as a country with rich resources and poor development
outcomes, makes it ideal for the study of capital flight.
Côte d’Ivoire was “long touted as an island of political stability and (relative)
economic prosperity in West Africa,” wrote Boubacar N’Diaye (2005, p. 89), but
since the turn of the century the country “has joined the more common category
in the sub-region: praetorian states mired in political uncertainty and unend-
ing turbulence.” Klass (2008, p. 109) echoed the sentiment, saying “Once touted
as the ‘Ivorian miracle,’ Côte d’Ivoire has become a development nightmare.” In
the past decade, the country has recovered to the point of regaining its status as
one of “Africa’s most rapidly expanding economies, with significant oil, gas and
mineral reserves; a major agriculture sector; and a growing, youthful population
driving the country forward” (Oxford Business Group 2020). But the country is
still struggling to recover from its troubled past and the failure to harness its nat-
ural resources, notably as the world’s top producer of cocoa, for the benefit of its
people. Instead, the cocoa sector has been the scene of complex and often cor-
rupt schemes of “rent-seeking” by domestic political elites in collusion with global
business partners (Losch 2002). The case study of Côte d’Ivoire focuses on the co-
coa sector to illustrate the interplay between capital flight and the plunder of the
country’s resources.
South Africa, a member of the elite G20 club of rich countries, is the second
largest economy in Sub-Saharan Africa after Nigeria, and the most integrated in
the global economy, with a sophisticated financial system. Owing to its diversi-
fied economy, it is less dependent on its natural resources than Angola or Côte
d’Ivoire. But its mineral sector has been an arena for massive export misinvoicing
and tax evasion by politically well-connected private individuals and corporations.
In the post-apartheid era, the country witnessed both concerted liberalization of
the economy and an explosion of capital flight. Again, transnational networks have
played a key role in enabling illicit outflows of wealth to the detriment of the vast
majority of the country’s people.
Structure of the Book
The book comprises five chapters besides the introduction and the conclusion.
Chapter 2 presents updated estimates of capital flight and one of its important
elements, trade misinvoicing, for the three case-study countries. The results in-
dicate that all three have experienced substantial capital flight over the past four
decades, amounting to $103 billion (in constant 2018 dollars) for Angola, $55 bil-
lion for Côte d’Ivoire, and $329 billion for South Africa.3 Misinvoicing, especially
in primary commodity exports, has been an important mechanism of capital flight.
The fact that unrecorded capital outflows have persisted over a long period sug-
gests that they are driven by systemic structural and institutional factors pertaining
to both the source countries and the global financial system. Capital flight has led
to the accumulation of massive offshore wealth belonging to the economic and
political elites of these countries, even as their populations continue to face de-
privation in access to basic services. In all three African countries, capital flight
is a major obstacle to development financing that needs to be tackled through
coordinated national and international strategies.⁴
In Chapter 3, Nicholas Shaxson examines how Angola has failed to take advan-
tage of its vast oil reserves to transform its economy and improve the lives of its
people. During its “golden decade,” between the end of the civil war in 2002 and
the oil price crash of 2014–2015, Angola exported massive amounts of oil under
a patronage system that kept the benefits in the hands of the president’s family
and a narrow elite. Today the country faces the depletion of its oil reserves with
very little to show in terms of development outcomes beyond the country’s capital,
Luanda. Shaxson poses the question: where did the money go? He explains how
a large chunk of Angola’s wealth ended up overseas in the hands of a relatively
small number of individuals, enabled by a transnational network of intermedi-
aries. This giant money drain is a tragic story that Angola shares with many other
resource-rich African countries.
In Chapter 4, Jean Merckaert tells the story of capital flight from Côte d’Ivoire,
focusing on the cocoa sector. He describes how the impressive economic growth
fueled by cocoa exports after independence, once hailed as the “Ivorian miracle,”
evaporated after the collapse of cocoa prices and the explosion of foreign debt.
As the country plunged into an economic crisis, followed by a political crisis that
culminated in civil war, the primary commodity sector continued to be highly
vulnerable to illicit financial flows. The chapter documents large and persistent
discrepancies between Côte d’Ivoire’s export statistics and the import statistics of
its major partners in the cocoa trade, indicative of substantial capital flight through
export misinvoicing. Merckaert traces the continuities and changes across polit-
ical regimes since independence in the mechanisms of resource rent capture and
personal enrichment and the roles of the key national and foreign players. The
patronage nexus linking state power to market power contributed to large-scale
3 The estimates for Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa refer to the period 1970 to 2018; for Angola they
refer to the period 1986 to 2018 owing to insufficient data for earlier years.
⁴ See UNCTAD (2020) for an analysis of the implications of illicit financial flows for sustainable
development in Africa.
capital flight and the failure of the country to take full advantage of its natural
resource endowments.
Chapter 5 turns to the case of South Africa. Adam Aboobaker, Karmen Naidoo,
and Léonce Ndikumana examine the mechanisms, actors, enablers, and institu-
tional environment that have facilitated capital flight from South Africa and the
attendant accumulation of offshore private wealth. While capital flight is not a new
phenomenon in South Africa, it accelerated during the modern era of economic
liberalization and rapid integration into the global economy. The financial hemor-
rhage deepens the country’s financing gaps, multidimensional poverty, inequality,
and unemployment. The chapter describes the systematic failure of the country’s
regulatory system, which has been compromised by “state capture” orchestrated
by an intricate network of private enablers with deep connections within the gov-
ernment and the global economy. It illustrates the phenomenon with the story
of the Gupta family, which built its fortune by forging connections with key
figures in government and parastatal companies in the mining and energy sec-
tors, and used a complex network of opaque transactions to move money out of
the country.⁵ The authors discuss the adverse effects of capital flight on economic
development, state institutions and governance, and call for urgent attention to
prevent even more devastating consequences for the country’s political and social
instability.
In Chapter 6, Melvin Ayogu examines the double-edged role of governance in
capital flight. Poor governance enables capital flight and undermines the fight
against it. Capital flight, in turn, erodes the quality of governance and weakens
the regulatory system. Focusing on international trade and trade-related finan-
cial transactions, Ayogu demonstrates that “the sword of governance has been
wielded to cut predominantly one way—to facilitate capital flight—in key African
countries.” He argues that “getting governance right” will require reforms in the
management and oversight of international trade data to enhance quality, con-
sistency, and transparency in data reporting and the exchange of information.
The chapter describes the complexities governing import and export transactions,
with a view to understanding how political, social, and economic arrangements
facilitate corruption in general, and capital flight in particular. Changing the rules
of the game in international trade will be an important step in building a global
constituency in the fight against capital flight.
The issues analyzed in these case studies are by no means unique to these three
countries. We hope that the evidence presented in this book will help sow the seeds
for more detailed investigations of the economic and institutional mechanisms of
capital flight in Africa, so as to provide input into the design and implementa-
tion of better-targeted policies to combat this scourge. Increasingly, addressing the
⁵ The dealings of the Gupta family and key former government officials are the subject to ongoing
investigation by the Office of the Public Protector South Africa (2016) and investigative journalists.
problem of capital flight is considered as a central pillar of the agenda of mobilizing

financing for sustainable development in Africa (UNCTAD 2020).
The evidence presented in this volume on the complex network of actors and
enablers involved in orchestrating and facilitating capital flight, and in the accu-
mulation of private wealth in offshore secrecy jurisdictions, underscores the point
that capital flight is a global phenomenon, a shared responsibility for Africa and
the global community. Addressing the problem of capital flight and related issues
such as trade misinvoicing, money laundering, tax evasion and theft of public as-
sets by political and economic elites will require national and global efforts with a
high level of coordination.
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2
Capital Flight from Angola, Côte d’Ivoire,
and South Africa
An Overview
Introduction
This chapter presents an overview of capital flight from Angola, Côte d’Ivoire,
and South Africa during the period 1970–2018. It begins with a discussion of the
distinction between capital flight and illicit financial flows, two overlapping but
different phenomena, although the terms have often been used interchangeably in
both technical literature and the media.
The measurement of capital flight follows the methodology used by Ndikumana
and Boyce (2010) and Henry (2012), among others, in which capital flight con-
sists of unrecorded capital flows, measured as discrepancies between the inflows
and outflows of foreign exchange reported in the country’s official balance of pay-
ments. Net foreign exchange inflows consist mainly of additions to the stock of
external debt and foreign investment. In the absence of capital flight, these capital
account inflows would be balanced by the sum of the current account deficit and
net additions to foreign exchange reserves. In the presence of capital flight, the
discrepancy between recorded inflows and recorded outflows leaves a residual.
Net trade misinvoicing, derived from trading partner data comparisons, is
added to this residual to obtain the measure of capital flight. A key innovation
in this chapter is that it goes beyond national aggregate measures to examine trade
misinvoicing at the bilateral and product levels in order to shed light on possible
conduits of capital flight, focusing on major export commodities.
In addition to the flow perspective on capital flight, it is important to recognize
that a substantial fraction of the capital that is smuggled abroad is invested offshore
in income-generating assets. We therefore present estimates of stocks of private
wealth accumulated offshore, drawing on the prior work of James Henry (2012,
2016). The twin processes of unrecorded capital outflows and the accumulation of
Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce, Capital Flight from Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, and South Africa. In: On the Trail
of Capital Flight from Africa. Edited by Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce, Oxford University Press.
© Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce (2022). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198852728.003.0002
hidden offshore private wealth are aided and abetted by enabling institutions in
the international financial system.
We first present the definitions of the key concepts used in the chapter and
describe the methodology and the data used to estimate capital flight.1 This is
followed by the results for Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, and South Africa, respectively.
Finally, we discuss the unrecorded offshore wealth resulting from capital flight.
Definitions, Methodology, and Data
Capital flight as a subset of illicit financial flows
Capital flight refers to capital outflows that are illicit by virtue of illegal acquisition,
illegal transfer, and/or illegal concealment from tax authorities. It is useful to clar-
ify the relationship between capital flight and “illicit financial flows,” concepts that
at times have been used interchangeably in recent literature and policy debates.2
While all capital flight is illicit, not all illicit financial flows are capital flight. Pay-
ments for smuggled imports, for example, involve illicit financial flows, but they
are not capital flight.
In quantitative studies, capital flight is usually measured as the missing residual
in the balance of payments, after making corrections for underreported external
borrowing and possibly for trade misinvoicing. Since this measure is based on un-
recorded flows, it captures the illegal transfer aspect of capital flight. But it may
miss capital flight that is transferred legally but is illicit in other respects. For
example, some illicitly acquired funds may be laundered domestically and then
sent abroad as recorded transfers.
Mechanisms for illicit transfer include the smuggling of bank notes, clandes-
tine wire transfers, and falsification of trade invoices. The motives for these illicit
transfers include evasion of judicial scrutiny of the origins of the wealth, evasion
of taxes, and fear of extortion or outright expropriation.
In addition to being illicit by virtue of its unrecorded transfer, this measured
capital flight is often illicit in other respects. Illicitly acquired capital is money
obtained through corruption, embezzlement, theft, bribes, extortion, tax evasion,
counterfeit, trafficking in illegal goods and services, and other criminal activities.
Wealth acquired illicitly is often transferred abroad in an effort to shield it from
legal scrutiny and forfeiture risk. Illicitly held funds are external assets that are not
declared to national authorities of the owner’s country. The concealment of foreign
assets may be motivated by the desire to evade prosecution for illicit acquisition
or transfer of the funds, and to evade taxes on asset earnings.
1 Details can be found in Ndikumana and Boyce (2019).

2 For further discussion, see Cobham and Jansky (2020), Ndikumana et al. (2015), and Reuter (2012).
12 capital flight from angola, côte d’ivoire, and south africa
Private assets held abroad are a heterogeneous pool that includes legitimate cap-
ital associated with normal portfolio allocation, laundered capital that was illegally
acquired but legally transferred, smuggled capital that was legally acquired but il-
legally transferred, and dirty capital that was both illegally acquired and illegally
transferred. The measures of capital flight presented in this chapter comprise the
latter two categories.
Capital flight and other illicit financial flows share in common the feature
that they all involve cross-border movements of money. For the economy of
origin, these flows result in net losses of foreign exchange, tax revenue, and cap-
ital. At the same time, the corresponding inflows confer costs as well as benefits
upon the foreign economies that receive them, as the attendant gains in foreign
exchange, tax revenue, and capital are accompanied by adverse effects, including
corrosion of the integrity of private and public institutions.
A central theme of this book is that capital flight is enabled by factors and actors
both in the countries of origin and in the destination countries. The illicit export of
capital from Africa is a manifestation of failures in the international financial sys-
tem that facilitates and enables it. Former German President Horst Köhler (2015,
p. 6) put the matter clearly:
There is an African proverb: “Beware of the naked man who offers you clothes.”
And my goodness, we Europeans are naked, with our double standards and our
comfortable hypocrisy vis-à-vis our past and present contribution to Africa’s
problems. It is high time we regained our credibility.
We cannot ignore the global kleptocratic model of capitalism that is sucking ob-
scene amounts of capital out of Africa in particular—and certainly more than is
being invested in the continent as development assistance. Chief among the ben-
eficiaries of this flight of capital are the European banks where African despots
and tax-evading corporations stash their billions. If we finally brought order to
the international financial system and allowed the tax havens to wither away, that
would be credible!
Because capital flight from Africa is a transnational phenomenon involving shared

costs and responsibilities for Africans and the global community, any analysis of
its drivers and strategies to prevent it must address both sides of the flows.
Capital flight as a balance of payments residual
Measuring capital flight is a challenging exercise because it is by nature a hid-

den activity that can be measured only indirectly. Complicating matters further,
the underlying data that can be used in such a forensic exercise are themselves
imperfect and fraught with imprecision. The original approach to measuring cap-
ital flight considered it as consisting of discrepancies between recorded inflows
and uses of foreign exchange as reported in the country’s balance of payments.
This became known as the residual method.
In the wake of the debt crisis of the early 1980s, World Bank economists
uncovered that inflows of external borrowing had been substantially underre-
ported in the official balance of payments accounts of many developing countries,
as a result of which their accumulated stock of external debt turned out to be much
larger than previously assumed. The World Bank’s World Debt Tables (WDT),
which were reconstructed to track debt flows better than the balance of pay-
ments (BoP), were therefore used as an alternative source of data on external
borrowing in the computation of capital flight.3 The WDT were later renamed
the Global Finance Development (GDF) database, and subsequently International
Debt Statistics (IDS).
To obtain a more accurate measure of resource inflows through external bor-
rowing, three important adjustments have been made to the published debt series.
First, given that countries borrow in different currencies and that the stock of debt
is reported at the end of the year in a common currency (the US dollar), varia-
tions in the exchange rates of the currencies of original denomination of the debt
vis-à-vis the dollar may create biases in the debt inflows obtained as simple year-
on-year changes in debt stock. The debt stock is therefore adjusted by taking into
account the currency composition of long-term debt.⁴
Second, following Henry (2012), an adjustment is made to correct the bias
caused by the fact that interest arrears are added to the debt stock in the IDS
database even though they do not correspond to inflows of foreign exchange. To
obtain an accurate measure of annual debt inflows, net changes in interest arrears
are subtracted from the change in debt stock.
Third, the series are adjusted for debt forgiveness and write-offs. Otherwise, the
resulting changes in end-of-year debt stocks would give the false impression of a
debt repayment and apparent outflow of foreign exchange.
For each country, the annual measure of capital flight by the residual method is
computed as follows:
( )
KF = CDEBTADJ + FDI + PI + OI − CAD + CRES (1)
where CDEBTADJ is the change in the external debt stock, adjusted for exchange
rate fluctuations, change in interest arrears, and debt forgiveness; FDI is foreign di-
rect investment; PI is foreign portfolio investment; OI is other foreign investments;
CAD is the current account deficit; and CRES is net additions to foreign exchange
3 For discussion, see World Bank (1985), Erbe (1986), and Lessard and Williamson (1987).
⁴ Details of the adjustment algorithm are provided in Ndikumana and Boyce (2010).
reserves. Data on debt are obtained from the World Bank’s International Debt
Statistics Database.⁵ Data for the other variables are taken from the balance of
payments.⁶
Adjustment for trade misinvoicing
The BoP data on trade transactions may be subject to erroneous or deliberate

misinvoicing of the value of imports and exports. In addition to smuggling, mis-
invoicing is a channel of capital flight and money laundering.⁷ Attention to trade
misinvoicing dates from the 1960s with the pioneering work of Jagdish Bhagwati
(Bhagwati 1964, 1967; Bhagwati and Hansen 1973; Bhagwati et al. 1974), and was
revived in the 1980s in the context of the research on capital flight motivated by
the debt crisis faced by developing countries (Gulati 1987).
In addition to serving as a mechanism for capital flight through the under-
invoicing of exports (allowing foreign exchange receipts to be sequestered abroad)
and the over-invoicing of imports (allowing foreign exchange outflows in excess of
the true cost of imports), misinvoicing can also take the form of import smuggling
for tariff evasion. In “technical” smuggling, a false invoice is submitted that under-
states the true value of the imported goods and services. In “pure” smuggling, the
import is wholly concealed and no invoice is submitted. Of course, imports must
be paid for (in foreign exchange) regardless of whether or not accurate invoices are
submitted to the authorities. These payments are one type of illicit financial out-
flows, but since goods and services are received in return, they are not a transfer
of assets and hence not capital flight.
The accuracy of the residual measure of capital flight can be improved by ad-
justments for the impacts of trade misinvoicing. The net effect on the magnitude
of capital flight can go in either direction. If misinvoicing for purposes of capital
flight exceeds smuggling, the adjustment adds to the total; conversely, if smuggling
exceeds misinvoicing for purposes of capital flight, the adjustment subtracts from
the total since part of the missing money in the balance of payments was used to
finance the unrecorded imports.
⁵ The International Debt Statistics (IDS) database is available at https://databank.worldbank.

org/source/international-debt-statistics. For South Africa, the IDS series starts in 1994; hence data for
1970–1993 were obtained from the African Development Indicators (now discontinued), the South
African Reserve Bank, and the African Development Bank.
⁶ Data on foreign direct investment may also be obtained from the UNCTAD statisti-
cal database (UNCTAD Data Center, Investment: http://unctadstat.unctad.org/wds/ReportFolders
/reportFolders.aspx).
⁷ Estimates of the share of trade misinvoicing in illicit financial flows and capital flight vary across
studies due to differences in methodology, data and sample. Spanjers and Salomon (2017) estimate
that trade misinvoicing represents up to 87% of total illicit financial flows from developing countries
from 2005 to 2014. See, for example, Ndikumana et al. (2015), Kar and Spanjers (2014), and UNCTAD
(2016).
Measuring trade misinvoicing
The measurement of trade misinvoicing is based on data from the Direction of

Trade Statistics (DOTS) database compiled by the IMF, which reports aggregate
imports and exports by partner.⁸ Misinvoicing for specific products can be mea-
sured using the Comtrade database compiled by the United Nations Statistics
Division. Trade misinvoicing can be estimated at three levels: for all trading part-
ners taken together, for trade with individual partners, and for specific products.
Misinvoicing estimates are based on the simple principle that the value of
exports reported by country A to country B should match the value of imports
reported by country B from country A, after accounting for the cost of insurance
and freight (cif).⁹ When the data from trading partners can be considered more re-
liable than the mirror data reported by African authorities, comparisons between
the two can be used to estimate the direction and magnitude of net misinvoicing.
In the case of exports, we expect such comparisons to show systematic under-
invoicing, motivated by the desire to evade taxes, retain some of the export
proceeds abroad (often in violation of controls on foreign exchange outflows), and
avoid having to convert them into local currency at the official exchange rate (of-
ten less favorable than the market rate). Apart from special circumstances (such as
export incentive programs), there is little motive for over-invoicing of exports. In
the case of imports, however, the net impact of misinvoicing can go either way: if
under-invoicing for smuggling exceeds over-invoicing for capital flight, the value
of exports reported by the trading partner will exceed the value of imports reported
by the African country (after adding the cost of insurance and freight), whereas if
import over-invoicing dominates (as a way to obtain foreign exchange from the
central bank and shift it abroad), the discrepancy has the opposite sign. The net
trade misinvoicing adjustment in capital flight estimates is obtained as the sum of
export misinvoicing and import misinvoicing.1⁰
Motivations for trade misinvoicing
Trade misinvoicing thus occurs for a number of reasons, including financial mo-
tives, circumvention of foreign exchange controls, and reduction of administrative
burdens.11
⁸ The Direction of Trade Statistics database is available at http://www.imf.org/en/data.

⁹ This principle was first proposed more than a century ago by Ferraris (1885).
1⁰ For details, see Ndikumana and Boyce (2019).
11 See Buehn and Eichler (2011); Buehn and Farzanegan (2012); Patnaik et al. (2012); Storti and de
Grauwe (2012); and Kellenberg and Levinson (2016). See also UNCTAD (2016) for further discussion
with a focus on primary commodities exports from resource-rich developing countries.
Financial motives: Exporters and importers may engage in misinvoicing to min-

imize tax liabilities and take advantage of tax incentives. Import under-invoicing
enables importers to reduce tariffs, and pure smuggling allows them to avoid
them altogether. In addition to the under-reporting of the value of imports, mis-
invoicing may occur through the misreporting of product types by declaring
low-tariff products in lieu of the actual products that face higher import tariff
rates.12
Similarly, export under-invoicing may result from attempts to avoid export taxes
levied on specific products (McDonald 1985). In the presence of tax incentives
aimed at promoting exports, exporters may instead resort to over-invoicing, in-
flating the value of their exports to reap more incentive payments. But when the
exporter must surrender the inflated amount of foreign exchange to the central
bank, export over-invoicing will occur only if the firm expects the gains from extra
subsidies to exceed the costs of the premium on foreign exchange on the black
market (Bhagwati 1967, p. 67).
Circumventing exchange controls: Another motive for misinvoicing is to bypass
currency controls to get access to foreign exchange and move money abroad. In
the presence of strict controls, misinvoicing provides a means to acquire foreign
exchange that can be held abroad or traded for a profit on the black market. Such
an environment can be expected to encourage over-invoicing of imports (so that
importers obtain extra foreign exchange from the central bank above and beyond
what is required to pay for the imports), and under-invoicing of exports (so that
exporters do not have to surrender all of their foreign exchange earnings to the
central bank at the official exchange rate). Empirical studies have found a positive
correlation between the black-market premium and the extent of import over-
invoicing (see, for example, Bahmani-Oskooee and Goswami 2003; Barnett 2003;
and Biswas and Marjit 2005).
Reducing administrative burdens: Perceived or actual onerous administrative
procedures can incite firms to underreport the true value of trade. Bureaucratic
and regulatory inefficiencies can create costs to importers and exporters and
delay the authorization of relevant transactions. Firms may seek to circumvent
these hurdles to speed up the inward and outward shipment of merchandise. Such
hurdles are most likely to be prevalent in countries with high levels of corruption
in the customs service as well as those with low human and technological capacity
to process imports and exports. Such an environment is expected to induce more
smuggling, a prediction that has been supported by empirical evidence (Fisman
and Wei 2007; Berger and Nitsch 2012).
12 Bhagwati (1964) noted that import under-invoicing appeared to be prevalent in the case of prod-
ucts facing high tariffs, and subsequent studies have lent support to this proposition (Buehn and Eichler
2011; Epaphra 2015; Fisman and Wei 2004).
Methodological and data issues
The estimation of trade misinvoicing faces a number of issues related to method-

ology and data. The first and most general problem is the availability and quality
of mirror trade data. Some countries do not report trade data to the IMF, in
which case the IMF may impute the numbers reported in DOTS from partner
data. In such cases, comparisons of mirror trade data cannot detect misin-
voicing. This is the case for Angola; for this reason the estimates of Angolan
capital flight presented in this chapter do not include adjustments for trade
misinvoicing. In the case of South Africa, the series in the electronic DOTS
database starts only in 1998, so the estimates of South African capital flight for
1970–1997 reported here do not include misinvoicing adjustments for those earlier
years.13
A second issue is the lack of transaction-specific information on the cost of
insurance and freight. For any given country, such costs may vary by trading
partner, by product, and over time. In the absence of more detailed informa-
tion, the conventional practice in the literature is to use as a proxy the average
cif/fob ratio reported by the IMF. Until 2018, this ratio was 1.1; that is, the costs
of freight and insurance were assumed to add 10% to the freight-on-board value
of the shipment. In 2018, the IMF DOTS changed this proxy, on the basis of an
OECD study that estimated a trade-weighted average of International Transporta-
tion and Insurance Cost (ITIC) of merchandise.1⁴ Since then, the IMF has used
10% for the adjustment through 1999 and 6% from 2000 onward. Accordingly,
we use the same ratios to estimate aggregate trade misinvoicing: 10% from 1970
to 1999 and 6% thereafter. For misinvoicing estimates at the partner and product
levels, however, we make use of more specific cif/fob ratios reported in the ITIC
database.1⁵
Angola
Angola experienced substantial capital flight over the period from 1986 to 2018,
as shown in Table 2.1. In this period the country experienced cumulative un-
recorded net outflows amounting to $103 billion. The estimates for Angola begin
only in 1986, due to the lack of earlier data on relevant indicators. Moreover, un-
like the other two countries examined here, inadequate data prevents an analysis
13 We do not use the earlier printed DOTS data for this purpose due inconstistencies with the
subsequent electronic version.
1⁴ See IMF (2018) and Marini et al. (2018).
1⁵ For each product the ratio used is the average estimate over the 2012–2016 period covered by
the OECD database. Data and methodological issues are further discussed in Ndikumana and Boyce
(2019), Cobham and Jansky (2020), and UNCTAD (2020).
Table 2.1 Capital flight from Angola (billion, constant 2018 dollars)
1986–89 1990–99 2000–09 2010–18 1970–2018
CDEBTADJ 9.1 10.0 12.4 39.0 70.5

FDI 1.3 8.6 10.1 −23.8 −3.9
PI 0.0 0.0 −8.4 3.0 −5.4
OI 3.3 −1.1 −12.4 16.2 6.0
CA −0.8 −6.2 30.7 36.1 59.7
CRES 0.0 −0.7 −15.6 −7.4 −23.8
Capital flight 12.8 10.5 16.8 63.1 103.1
Memorandum: total private capital flows

(FDI+PI+OI) 4.6 7.5 −10.7 −4.7 −3.4
Source: Authors’ computations (for variable key and method, see text).
of trade misinvoicing. (The Angola export and import data reported in the DOTS
are based on partner data, so cannot be used to calculate misinvoicing.) As a result,
the analysis for Angola omits a potentially important channel of capital flight.1⁶
Capital flight from Angola was especially pronounced after the turn of the cen-
tury, a period that includes the country’s “golden decade” of peace and high oil
prices as well as the final years of the long-lived dos Santos regime, as described
by Nicholas Shaxson in this book.
Several other notable features emerge from an examination of the balance of
payments for Angola. The first is massive accumulation of current account sur-
pluses, mainly driven by oil exports. The second is a reversal in capital flows since
the past decade: from 2010 to 2018, net foreign direct investment outflows to-
taled a staggering $23.8 billion. In contrast, the period from 1986 to 2009 saw
cumulative net inflows of FDI of $20 billion. In addition, portfolio investment
generated net outflows amounting to $8.4 billion over 2000–2009, and other in-
vestment recorded a net outflow in the 1990s and 2000s of $13.5 billion, although
this was offset by net inflows of $16.2 billion in 2010–2018.
This raises the question of what lies behind these massive recorded net outflows
of private capital. In the case of FDI, outflows could arise from foreign firms’ repa-
triation of profits to their home countries. The outflows may reflect investments
abroad by Angolan residents as well. In the case of portfolio investment, the net
outflows may be driven by speculation by private investors in search of higher
risk-adjusted returns. They could also reflect portfolio adjustments by firms with
substantial cash balances that they decide to invest or hold abroad. Insofar as the
1⁶ In the case of exports, the Angolan economy is heavily dependent on petroleum and related prod-
ucts, and its top five trading partners account for roughly 80% of the total. Using the limited data on
petroleum that is reported in Comtrade for the period 2009–2018, mirror partner data comparison
shows minimal discrepancies (see Ndikumana and Boyce 2019).
Table 2.2 Capital flight from Côte d’Ivoire (billion, constant 2018 dollars)
1970–79 1980–89 1990–99 2000–09 2010–18 1970–2018
CDEBTADJ 14.0 22.2 7.9 0.5 7.5 52.0

FDI 1.6 1.1 3.5 3.9 3.8 13.8
PI −0.1 0.0 −0.1 0.2 6.6 6.6
OI 8.8 18.7 6.7 −5.5 −17.9 10.7
CA −11.7 −18.9 −8.8 4.2 −0.8 −36.1
CRES 0.1 0.4 −1.3 −2.3 −3.4 −6.5
BoP 12.6 23.3 7.8 0.9 −4.1 40.5
Residual
Trade 7.6 2.5 4.0 0.9 0.0 14.9
misinvoicing
Adjusted 20.2 25.8 11.8 1.8 −4.2 55.4
capital flight

FDI+PI+OI 10.3 19.7 10.1 −1.5 −7.5 31.1
Source: Authors’ computations (for method, see text).
recorded outflows were of Angolan capital, rather than foreign capital, the data
raise the possibility that they include funds that were illicitly acquired or concealed
abroad despite having been transferred through officially recorded channels. This
would imply that the measured capital flight reported here understates the true
magnitude.
Côte d’Ivoire
Estimates of capital flight from Côte d’Ivoire are summarized in Table 2.2. Over
the 1970–2018 period, the residual method from the balance of payments yields
a total of $40.5 billion. Overall the country experienced export under-invoicing
to the tune of $5.9 billion and net import over-invoicing of $9 billion; adjustment
for trade misinvoicing therefore adds $14.9 billion, bringing total capital flight to
$55.4 billion.
The pattern changed over time. In the 1970s and 1980s, the country saw sub-
stantial capital flight. The outflow diminished in the 1990s, and a phase of reversals
began in 1998, leading to net unrecorded capital inflows after the turn of the cen-
tury (although net outflows resumed in 2015). The reversal period, which included
years of civil war, also saw a decline in net external borrowing and net outflows of
private capital that were officially recorded in the balance of payments under the
heading “other investments.”
An analysis of trade misinvoicing in the case of cocoa, Côte d’Ivoire’s top export,
sheds further light on one mechanism for capital flight. Using partner-specific
Table 2.3 Cocoa export misinvoicing in Côte d’Ivoire, 2000–2018 (million, constant
2018 dollars)
Partner Ivorian exports Partner imports cif factor Export misinvoicing
Belgium 4463.4 4734.7 1.064 −13.5

Estonia 2292.1 1187.3 1.064 −1252.2
France 5413.3 7798.4 1.062 2051.7
Germany 4522.8 9102.8 1.023 4475.1
Italy 2035.2 2460.8 1.045 334.5
Netherlands 19607.0 17662.0 1.064 −3195.9
Spain 2048.5 2109.3 1.063 −67.8
UK 2252.7 2443.6 1.020 146.3
USA* 12611.7 14156.9 * 1545.2
Total 55246.7 61656.0 4023.4
* USA imports reported at fob value.

Note: Export misinvoicing = (partner imports) – (cif x Ivorian exports). Only years where both
parties report data are considered.
Source: Authors’ computations using data from Comtrade (SITC 072).
mirror data from Comtrade, available starting in the year 2000, we examine the
discrepancy between recorded Ivorian exports and imports recorded by the major
trading partners in developed countries, whose trade data are usually assumed to
be more reliable. We calculate export misinvoicing as the difference between the
two after adjusting for the cost of insurance and freight, which Comtrade reports
at the product and partner level.
Overall we find a pattern of export under-invoicing: for the nine leading trad-
ing partners as a group, this amounted to $4 billion in the 2000–2018 period as
a whole (see Table 2.3). This is equivalent to about 7.3% of the declared value
of exports to the same destinations. As we have noted, under-invoicing allows
exporters to conceal part of their foreign exchange earnings abroad, rather than
reporting the full amount and converting them into local currency at the central
bank.
The Netherlands stands out as a notable exception to this pattern. Its reported
value of cocoa imports is substantially below the corresponding value of exports
reported by Côte d’Ivoire, an unusual case of apparent export over-invoicing. The
same anomaly can be seen in cocoa exports to Estonia. This is likely to reflect
the role of both countries as trading hubs: companies registered there buy Ivo-
rian cocoa and then on-sell it to other destinations that record it as imported from
Côte d’Ivoire. (Transshipments by Dutch firms may also help to explain the unusu-
ally high degree of apparent under-invoicing in Germany.) A transparent trading
regime based on internationally agreed reporting standards would accurately track
and report the origins and destinations of cargoes. Côte d’Ivoire would record
the final destinations of its cocoa, and the destinations would record the goods as
Table 2.4 Capital flight from South Africa (billion, constant 2018 dollars)
1970–79 1980–89 1990–99 2000–09 2010–18 1970–2018
CDEBTADJ 3.9 22.5 10.6 68.2 110.5 215.7

FDI 2.5 −4.7 −6.9 44.2 0.4 35.6
PI 0.0 −3.6 45.2 33.6 109.4 184.6
OI 1.0 −10.5 −10.7 23.8 41.3 44.9
CA −24.5 11.0 −1.0 −81.4 −127.8 −223.7
CRES 6.1 −6.2 −9.3 −34.1 −17.6 −61.1
BoP −11.1 8.6 27.8 54.4 116.2 196.0
Residual
Trade * * 4.9 97.7 30.9 133.5
misinvoicing
Adjusted −11.1 8.6 32.7 152.1 147.2 329.5
capital flight

FDI+PI+OI 3.5 −18.7 27.5 101.7 151.1 265.1
* Trade misinvoicing not available for 1970–89.

Source: Authors’ computations (for method, see text).
originating in Côte d’Ivoire; third parties like the Netherlands would simply record
the goods as being in transit. Jean Merckaert delves into this further in Chapter 3.
South Africa
The magnitude of capital flight from South Africa over the years 1970–2018 is
summarized in Table 2.4. Over the 1970–2018 period as a whole, South Africa
witnessed an estimated $329.5 billion of capital flight. This includes net trade
misinvoicing of $133.5 billion in the years 1998–2018, for which mirror data are
available for South Africa in the electronic DOTS database. Given the observed
pattern of misinvoicing in these later years, it is likely that our estimates understate
the magnitude of capital flight presented for the 1970–2018 period as a whole.
Along with capital flight, the table presents the main elements that enter into the
computation of the BoP residual. There are two notable trends in capital inflows
over the past two decades. The first is a rapid accumulation of external debt since
the turn of the century, reflecting a surge in external borrowing after the end of
the apartheid with the resumption of international economic and political coop-
eration. Second, the country experienced a substantial increase in private capital
inflows, especially in portfolio investment, reflecting the development of active eq-
uity markets that attracted foreign investors. Capital flight rose substantially, with
recorded inflows outpacing recorded uses (outflows) of foreign exchange.
Trade misinvoicing appears to have been an important channel of capital flight
from South Africa. Over the period 1998–2018, export under-invoicing totaled
Table 2.5 Non-monetary gold export misinvoicing in South Africa, 2000–2018

(billion, constant 2018 dollars)
Partner South Partner cif factor Export

Africa’s imports misinvoicing
exports
Hong Kong 2.7 30.3 1.002 27.6

India 0.2 8.4 1.035 8.2
Italy 0.0 9.1 1.021 9.0
Switzerland 0.4 7.2 1.025 6.8
Turkey 0.0 2.8 1.028 2.7
UAE 0.1 2.5 1.023 2.4
UK 0.3 32.5 1.009 32.2
Total 3.7 92.8 89.0
Note: Export misinvoicing = (partner imports) – (cif x South African exports). Only years where both
Source: Authors’ computations using data from Comtrade.
$185.2 billion, with large shortfalls between South Africa’s reported exports and
the much higher value of imports reported by its trading partners. Net under-
invoicing of imports amounted to $51.7 billion, indicating that smuggling for the
purpose of tariff evasion exceeded over-invoicing for the purpose of capital flight.
Smuggled imports must still be paid for in foreign exchange, so in our measure of
capital flight this reduces the net misinvoicing adjustment to $133.5 billion in the
period as a whole.
A substantial fraction of the exports recorded by South Africa was listed as going
to “non-specified areas.” In principle, the earnings from these exports would be
reported in the balance of payments accounts despite the lack of information re-
garding their destination. In calculating the misinvoicing adjustment we take this
into account.1⁷
An analysis of misinvoicing in the cases of gold and platinum, two of South
Africa’s leading exports, sheds further light on the phenomenon. Again using
partner-specific data from Comtrade at the commodity level (available
from the year 2000), we can examine discrepancies between South Africa’s
recorded exports and the mirror data on imports reported by major trading
partners.
The results for non-monetary gold are presented in Table 2.5.1⁸ The data re-
veal what appears to be massive under-invoicing: recorded exports to the United
1⁷ We apportion reported exports to non-specified destinations between developed and developing

countries based on their respective shares in the imports reported by trading partners. For details, see
Ndikumana and Boyce (2019).
1⁸ Gold exports are officially classified into two categories: monetary gold (gold held as reserve assets
by central banks) and non-monetary gold. According to data from South Africa’s Department of Trade
and Industry, monetary gold accounted for over 95% of the country’s total gold exports up to 2010 after
which the two series were merged. The results presented in here refer to non-monetary gold exports
only as Comtrade database does not report monetary gold exports.
Table 2.6 Platinum export misinvoicing in South Africa, 2001–2018 (billion,

constant 2018 dollars)
Partner South Partner cif factor Export

Africa’s imports misinvoicing
exports
China 2.6 24.2 1.026 21.5

Hong Kong 6.6 4.6 1.002 −2.0
Germany 11.6 14.0 1.015 2.2
Japan 45.1 50.7 1.032 4.2
Switzerland 17.9 11.6 1.024 −6.7
UK 19.6 14.2 1.009 −5.6
USA 31.1 38.5 * 7.4
Total 134.5 157.9 21.1
* USA imports reported at fob value.

Note: Export misinvoicing = (partner imports) – (cif x South African exports). Only years where both
Source: Authors’ computations using data from Comtrade (data are not available for the year 2002).
Kingdom, for example, were only $270 million, while imports recorded by the UK
for the corresponding years amounted to more than $32.5 billion. A similar dis-
crepancy can be seen for Hong Kong. For the seven countries in the table, total
export under-invoicing amounted to $89 billion.
To some extent, these discrepancies may reflect a failure to record destinations
rather than failure to record the exports themselves. In the case of non-monetary
gold, in particular, the bulk of exports recorded by South Africa are listed as go-
ing to “non-specified areas.”1⁹ Moreover, in some years South African trade data
do not record any exports to some countries that recorded imports. China, for
example, reported $38 billion in non-monetary gold imports from South Africa
over the period, while South Africa recorded no exports there. The results shown
in Table 2.5 omit years in which South Africa reported no exports to the partner
country.
Estimates for platinum are reported in Table 2.6. Again there is evidence of
considerable export under-invoicing, totaling $21 billion for the seven trading
partners shown. The apparent over-invoicing in exports to Switzerland are likely
to reflect the country’s role as a trading hub; similarly, the data for Hong Kong
could reflect re-exports to China.
1⁹ A further problem is inconsistencies in the distinction between monetary gold and non-monetary
gold before the two were merged in 2011. Prior to that year, according to the South African Reserve
Bank, “non-monetary gold was incorrectly classified as monetary gold by the entity responsible for
provision of trade statistics to the United Nations.” However, the Comtrade data shows that substantial
discrepancies between South Africa’s data and that of its partners persisted in the post-2011 period.
For more on South Africa’s gold export data, see Ndikumana and Boyce (2019).
From Unrecorded Outflows to Unrecorded Offshore Wealth
Thus far, we have focused on measuring unrecorded capital outflows. The evidence
demonstrated that all the three countries experienced high volumes of capital
flight over the past four decades as a whole. The fact that these outflows gener-
ally persisted over time suggests that they are driven by fundamental structural
and institutional factors in the source countries and the global financial system.
These unrecorded outflows cannot be explained simply as a result of portfolio
management decisions by savers seeking to maximize returns to investment. It
is not clear that interest rates in destination countries are higher than in African
countries. Instead most capital flight appears to be driven by medium- and long-
term considerations. In other words, it is flight with intention to stay. As James
Henry (2012, p. 23) puts it, “since net outflows from developing countries have
continued over sustained periods of time, and since little offshore wealth or the
earnings that it produces have been repatriated, the most important factors driving
it are not those that drive ‘hot money,’ but long-term de-capitalization.”
In addition to measuring the flows of capital flight, therefore, it is important to
assess the corresponding accumulation of private wealth held abroad. The story of
capital flight does not end with illicit crossing of national borders.
The concealment of private wealth accumulated through unrecorded capital
outflows is facilitated by services offered by offshore financial centers. The term
offshore here refers “not so much to the actual physical location of private assets or
liabilities, but to nominal, hyper-portable, multi-jurisdictional, often quite tempo-
rary locations of networks of legal and quasi-legal entities and arrangements that
manage and control private wealth—always in the interests of those who manage
it, supposedly in the interests of its beneficial owners, and often in indifference
or outright defiance of the interests and laws of multiple nation states” (Henry
2012, p. 9).
African private wealth held offshore has a number of deleterious effects on the
source countries and their people.2⁰ Here we highlight some of the most important.
First, the accumulation of unrecorded private wealth in offshore financial cen-
ters erodes the country’s tax base. In addition to initial losses in income tax when
private savings are concealed and exported abroad, subsequent losses are incurred
due to untaxed income from the hidden wealth. This is especially problematic for
African countries, which generally have very low tax revenue/GDP ratios and face
large and growing financial gaps. Globally, it has been estimated that the lost rev-
enue from unrecorded earnings on wealth stashed offshore is more than twice
the total development aid from OECD countries (Henry 2012). This substantially
changes the debate on financing for development. Rather than focusing exclusively
2⁰ Destination countries, too, experience deleterious impacts; for discussion, see Shaxson (2011,
2018).
on increasing foreign aid, as is typical in international discourse, the focus should

be on helping African countries reduce the tax losses due to base erosion resulting
from unrecorded offshore wealth.
Second, the accumulation of unrecorded offshore wealth dramatically changes
the picture of wealth inequality both within African countries and between Africa
and the rest of the world. Because unrecorded offshore wealth generally belongs
to political and economic elites, measures of national wealth inequality based
on recorded assets are systematically biased downward.21 At the same time, the
wealth gap between African countries and the rich countries where this wealth
is domiciled is likely to be lower than official statistics suggest. In short, African
countries may be wealthier than we think, but their wealth is grossly unequally
distributed.
Third, the accumulation of offshore wealth by African elites depresses public
service delivery, further increasing inequality. The lost tax revenue contributes to
suboptimal provision of public health, education and infrastructure, services on
which the poor depend most heavily. The poor in Africa cannot ‘vote with their
feet’ to protest poor public service delivery; unlike the rich, they cannot afford
education and health care for their families abroad. Meanwhile, as the elites do
not suffer as much from poor public service delivery, they have little incentive to
improve it.
Finally, the accumulation of offshore wealth undermines institutions of ac-
countability and the regulatory system. The elites who hold offshore wealth do
not have incentives for developing the type of institutions that would be needed
to stem capital flight, induce wealth repatriation and combat tax evasion; quite
the contrary. They are unlikely to promote capital controls, anti-money launder-
ing measures, customs reforms, policies to curb trade misinvoicing and the abuse
of transfer pricing rules, and so on. Ultimately, capital flight and offshore wealth
accumulation persist because of the incentive structures that make them possible
in the first place.
Measurement of hidden offshore wealth
There are several ways to measure private offshore wealth. In 2020 the Global
Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes, a re-
cent multilateral initiative based at the OECD, reported that for the year 2019
tax authorities in nearly 100 participating countries had obtained data on 84
million offshore accounts with assets totaling 10 trillion Euros, or about $11.5
trillion (OECD 2020). No breakdown is provided for the portion that is held by
Africans. This remarkable number, while impressive, understates total offshore
21 For discussion and examples, see Alstadsæter et al. (2018).

wealth in that not all countries and jurisdictions participate in the information ex-
change program, and financial institutions sometimes cannot identify the country
of residency of account holders.
One alternative approach to estimating offshore wealth uses cumulative histori-
cal capital flight flows, like those reported in this chapter, based on the assumption
that some fraction of these flows is saved. A second approach measures “miss-
ing wealth” as the discrepancy between recorded liabilities and assets as these are
reported in international financial statistics.
Wealth accumulation from capital flight
The first approach was used by James Henry in a study prepared for the Tax Justice
Network (Henry 2012, updated in Henry 2016).22 The premise is that substan-
tial amounts of unrecorded capital flight are held offshore for long-term purposes,
leading to the accumulation of offshore wealth that earns returns that often are
not taxed. Because this wealth is unrecorded, it is difficult to know its precise
amount and asset composition, including how much is held in liquid assets as
opposed to real estate, art objects, and other valuables. And some capital flight
is not saved but instead used for consumption, including the extravagant lifestyles
frequently profiled in investigative reports on prominent economic and political
figures.23
Henry (2012) proposed some working assumptions to address these issues
based on information from banks and interviews with informed observers. The
first assumption is that 50–75% of capital flight is invested offshore in income-
generating vehicles and physical assets. The second is that the earnings on these
offshore investments are not taxed. The third is that offshore wealth earns a mod-
est interest rate proxied by the rate on six-month CDs. On this basis, he capitalizes
past capital flight to arrive at an estimate of unrecorded private offshore wealth.
For Sub-Saharan Africa, the unrecorded stock of private wealth accumulated off-
shore stood at more than $700 billion in 2014. Table 2.7 presents estimates for our
three case study countries, along with regional totals for Sub-Saharan Africa, East
Asia, and Latin America.
These estimates imply that, contrary to commonly held beliefs, African coun-
tries are not heavily indebted vis-à-vis the rest of the world; rather they are net
creditors in the sense that the stock of private wealth stashed abroad exceeds
their external debts.2⁴ The problem is that this offshore wealth contributes little
or nothing to Africa’s development.
22 The results are available at “Global Haven Industry”: http://globalhavenindustry.com/.

23 For examples, see Ndikumana and Boyce (2012), Boyce and Ndikumana (2012a) and Boyce and
Ndikumana (2012b).
2⁴ For discussion, see also Boyce and Ndikumana (2001).
Table 2.7 Estimates of offshore wealth as stock of capital flight (billion dollars)
Country or Region Stock accumulated over 1970–2014
Angola 70.4
Côte d’Ivoire 14.0
South Africa 113.5
Top 5 SSA 639.6
SSA 709.8
East Asia (excl. China) 2524.0
Latin America and Caribbean 1969.8
Note: Based on flows of capital flight constructed by Henry (2016) without adjustments for trade
misinvoicing.
Source: Estimates are obtained from the Global Haven Industry database (http://globalhavenindustry.
com/).
Missing external assets
An alternative approach to measuring offshore wealth starts with anomalies that

can be found in the IMF data on international investment positions (IIP), which
report external liabilities and external assets—stocks of capital rather than the
flows reported in the BoP. Implausibly, these data purport to show that the world
as a whole is a “net debtor” (Lane and Milesi-Ferretti 2007). “There is a ‘hole’,” ob-
serves Gabriel Zucman (2015, p. 37), who takes this discrepancy as a measure of
hidden wealth: “If we look at the world balance sheet, more financial assets are
recorded as liabilities than as assets, as if planet Earth were in part held by Mars.”
In 2013, the hole amounted to $7.6 trillion (Zucman 2014).
Because the IIP data only refer to financial wealth, other types of hidden wealth
are missing from this number. As Zucman (2015, pp. 44–45) explains:
My method says nothing about the amount of non-financial wealth in tax havens.
This includes yachts registered in the Cayman Islands, as well as works of art,
jewelry, and gold stashed in freeports—warehouses that serve as repositories for
valuables. Geneva, Luxembourg, and Singapore all have one: in these places, great
paintings can be kept and traded tax-free—no customs duty or value-added tax
is owed—and anonymously, without ever seeing the light of day. High-net-worth
individuals also own real estate in foreign countries: islands in the Seychelles,
chalets in Gstaad, and so on. Registry data show that a large chunk of London’s
luxury real estate is held through shell companies, largely domiciled in the British
Virgin Islands, a scheme that enables owners to remain anonymous and to exploit
tax loopholes. Unfortunately, there is no way yet to estimate the value of such real
assets held abroad.
Zucman nonetheless reckons that his method captures the bulk of hidden wealth:
At the top of the wealth distribution—that is, for fortunes of dozens of millions
of dollars and more—on average most of the wealth takes the form of financial
securities. It is rare than someone invests all of his wealth in a yacht. It is one of
the great rules of capitalism that the higher one rises on the ladder of wealth, the
greater the share of financial securities in one’s portfolio.
He estimates that hidden wealth amounts to about 8% of total personal financial

wealth worldwide, and concludes that this is on the right order of magnitude, al-
though “one might imagine that the true figure, all wealth combined, is 10% or
11%.” This would suggest that hidden non-financial assets amounted to another
$2–3 trillion, bringing total hidden assets to around $10 trillion.
There are reasons to suspect, however, that this figure errs on the low side. High-
net-worth individuals who conceal their wealth behind veils of anonymity may
not follow the unwritten rules of capitalism with regard to portfolio allocation any
more than they obey its written rules (see Box 2.1).
Box 2.1 Hidden Real Estate
Evidence from the world’s “supercities”—global centers like New York, London,
Paris, Hong Kong and Singapore—suggest that anonymous real estate holdings
account for a substantial amount of hidden wealth.
The Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental body that combats
money laundering, reported in 2013 that “real estate accounted for up to 30%
of criminal assets confiscated in the last two years, demonstrating this as a clear
area of vulnerability” (FATF 2013, p. 24).
The Financial Times, announcing that “London has become a center for dirty
money,” reported in 2014 that at least £122 billion (about $200 billion) worth of
property in England and Wales is held by shell companies registered in offshore
tax havens, most of them in the British Virgin Islands and Channel Islands
(O’Murchu 2014).
In the United States, Title III of the Patriot Act, signed into law soon after the
September 11, 2001 attack, required banks to report suspicious money trans-
fers from abroad, but it contained an exemption for real estate purchases. This
“gaping loophole—and extraordinary growth opportunity for high-end real es-
tate,” meant that “foreigners could still buy penthouse apartments or mansions
anonymously and with ease, by hiding behind shell companies set up in states
such as Delaware and Nevada” (Foer 2019).
Shell companies accounted for 54% of luxury real estate purchases in

Manhattan in 2014, 51% in Los Angeles, and 48% in San Francisco in 2014
(New York Times 2015). The total value of residential property in Manhattan
is estimated at $733 billion (Metrocosm 2015), and luxury properties (those
sold for $4 million and up) accounted for about 37% of residential sales in
2014 (CityRealty 2017). Together these figures suggest that the value of hid-
den wealth invested in residential properties in Manhattan alone exceeds $100
billion.1
U.S. government investigations “continue to show corrupt politicians, drug
traffickers, and other criminals using shell companies to purchase luxury real
estate with cash,” Jennifer Shasky Calvery, director of the U.S. Treasury Depart-
ment’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, stated in a speech in 2016. “We
see wire transfers originating from foreign banks in offshore havens where shell
companies have established accounts, but in many cases we also see criminals
using U.S. incorporated limited liability companies to launder their illicit funds
through the U.S. real estate market” (quoted in Swanson (2016)).
“The real estate market has long provided a way for individuals to secretly
launder or invest stolen money and other illicitly gained funds,” observes a
study by Transparency International (2017, p. 5). “Not only do expensive apart-
ments in New York, London or Paris raise the social status of their owners and
enhance their luxurious lifestyles, but they are also an easy and convenient
place to hide hundreds of millions of dollars from criminal investigators, tax
authorities or others.”
_______
1 Calculated as follows: $733 billion x 0.37×0.54 = $146 billion. Note that this excludes all non-
residential property holdings as well as all residential properties valued at less than $4 million.
Apart from the non-financial assets mentioned by Zucman—art, yachts, gold,

jewelry, and real estate—a considerable amount of hidden wealth takes the form
of cash. One-hundred-dollar bills, though not widely used in day-to-day transac-
tions, account for 78% of the $1.5 trillion value of US banknotes in circulation.
The €500 note accounts for 30% of the total value of Euros, and the 1000 Swiss
franc note—which is especially handy for carrying in a briefcase, being worth
more than 20 times its weight in gold—accounts for 92% of the total value of the
Swiss currency (Sands 2016). “Rather than being a way of paying for things,” the
Economist (2016) remarks, large-denomination notes serve as a “convenient store
of value”—convenient, above all, for wealth holders who prize anonymity.
Furthermore, not even all of the world’s wealth that is hidden in the form of
financial assets shows up in the IIP discrepancy. To understand why, consider
Zucman’s (2015, p. 37) explanation for the discrepancy:
Let’s imagine a British person who holds in her Swiss bank account a portfo-
lio of American securities—for example, stock in Google. What information is
recorded in each country’s balance sheet? In the United States, a liability: Amer-
ican institutions see that foreigners hold US equities. In Switzerland, nothing at
all, and for a reason: the Swiss statisticians see some Google stock deposited in a
Swiss bank, but they see that the stock belongs to a UK resident—and so they are
neither assets nor liabilities for Switzerland. In the United Kingdom, nothing is
registered, either, but wrongly this time: the Office for National Statistics should
record an asset for the United Kingdom, but it can’t, because it has no way of
knowing that the British person has Google stock in her Geneva account.
(Zucman 2015, p. 37).
Now imagine that this same person holds Google stock in a bank account in the
United States, the country that is “by some measures, the world’s single most im-
portant tax haven” (Shaxson 2011, p. 18). The United States ranked second in
the world in the 2018 edition of the Financial Secrecy Index, which measures
the volume of foreign deposits and the laxity of transparency rules, between #1
Switzerland and #3 Cayman Islands (Tax Justice Network 2018). In this case, the
United States would not record an external liability, and the hidden asset would
not lead to a discrepancy in the IIP accounts. Similarly, if capital flight from Africa
is routed through a shell company incorporated in Delaware and then invested in
US equities, there is no discrepancy to be found.
Moreover, apart from unrecorded assets there also may be misrecorded assets—
external assets recorded in the IIP as belonging to country A, but whose beneficial
owners are really from country B. This is particularly likely if country A is a finan-
cial secrecy jurisdiction. Mauritius, for example, is a haven for capital from African
countries, including South Africa and Angola (Fitzgibbon 2017). With a popula-
tion of only 1.3 million, the country recorded a whopping $423 billion in external
assets in the IIP data in 2015, more than $300,000 per person, about 15 times the
country’s per capita income. By way of comparison, Poland and Turkey, with sim-
ilar per capita incomes, recorded external assets amounting to about $6000 and
$3000 per person, respectively.
For these reasons, while Zucman may be correct that the IIP discrepancy gives
the right order of magnitude for the world’s total hidden wealth—meaning that it
is closer to $7.6 trillion than to either $760 billion or $76 trillion—the total amount
may be considerably larger, perhaps by a multiple or two.
The IIP discrepancy provides a useful lower-bound estimate of total hidden
wealth, but it cannot tell us how hidden wealth is distributed by source regions or
countries. To estimate Africa’s hidden wealth one must rely on other data sources.
For this purpose, Zucman (2013, 2015) used data on financial assets held in Swiss
banks. Since 1998, the Swiss National Bank (SNB—Switzerland’s central bank) has
reported data on foreign-owned assets held in Swiss banks. These amounted to
$2.3 trillion in spring 2015. About 60% of these assets were held by shell corpo-
rations, trusts, and foundations, meaning that the nationality of their beneficial
owners was unknown. The SNB data do, however, report nationality for the re-
maining assets, and Zucman (2015, pp. 31–32) uses this information to impute
ownership of the assets held by shell corporations:
To know who really owns wealth in Switzerland, we need to make some as-
sumptions about who is behind these shell entities. After examining the available
evidence, the assumption I retain is that the wealth held through shell companies
belongs to American, British, or German citizens in the same proportion as the
directly held wealth does, with a correction to take into account that since 2005
Europeans have had greater incentives to use shell companies and Gulf countries
have less incentive to do so.
On this basis he concludes that Africa accounted for $150 billion of the non-
resident bank accounts in Switzerland, about 6.5% of the total. More than half
belonged to Europeans, with Germany, France, and Italy—the three countries that
share a border with Switzerland—leading the way, together accounting for $640
billion.
Africa likewise accounts for 6.5%, or $500 billion, in Zucman’s estimate of the
distribution by source countries of the $7.6 trillion in hidden wealth revealed
by the IIP discrepancy. In other words, Africa’s share of hidden financial wealth
worldwide in his calculations is the same as its share of directly held wealth
deposited in Swiss bank accounts.
Is it reasonable to assume that the distribution of wealth held by shell companies
in Swiss banks mirrors that of directly held assets? Do Germans and Angolans, for
example, have exactly the same incentives to channel funds through anonymous
offshore entities, incurring the attendant transaction costs, as opposed to opening
Swiss bank accounts in their own names? Or does the incentive to use shell entities
vary depending on the provenance of the funds?
If the motive for a British person to put money in a Swiss bank is simply to avoid
UK taxes, she may deem it sufficient to open an account in her own name. If the
UK government somehow were to learn of the ruse, the most she would face are
tax penalties. But if the motive is to conceal wealth that was acquired by fraudulent
or questionable means—if the wealth is the proceeds of what is called a “predicate
crime” in anti-money laundering legislation—she may decide that more elaborate
precautions, including routing the money through a shell company or a web of
shell companies, are worth the extra expense. For in this case, the penalty for being
caught could be forfeiture of the entire amount and criminal prosecution.2⁵
2⁵ To create paper trails that conceal the true origins of illicitly acquired funds, common ruses used
by offshore banks include backdated currency trades; opposing bets on stock market that cancel each
Law professor Cass Sunstein (2016), in a review of Zucman’s book, alludes to

this important point when he writes that “all uses of tax havens are not the same.”
Noting that Zucman’s estimates imply that half of Russia’s financial wealth is held
offshore, Sunstein suggests that “the extraordinarily high figure for Russia might
be best understood as involving money corruptly acquired or invested.” The same
may be true of Africa: by Zucman’s estimates 30% of the region’s financial wealth
is offshore, compared to 10% for Europe and 4% for the United States (Zucman
2015, p. 53).
In sum, estimates of missing external assets based on the global IIP anomalies,
while providing a useful indicator of the overall magnitude of offshore wealth,
cannot provide a reliable measure of the quantity or timing of capital flight from
individual African countries. For this purpose, our estimates start instead with
discrepancies in the country’s balance of payments, corrected as described above
for external borrowing and trade misinvoicing. When recorded inflows of foreign
exchange systematically exceed recorded outflows, we can safely assume that most
of the missing money is not sitting under mattresses in Johannesburg, Luanda,
or Abidjan. It is leaving Africa, although its departure is not registered in official
statistics.
To be sure, there is considerable uncertainty as to how much of the flight capital
is accumulated as savings and how much is dissipated in consumption overseas.
Extrapolating from outflows of money to stocks of wealth held offshore requires
strong assumptions, too. In terms of capital flight’s cost to source countries, how-
ever, it matters little whether the missing money is saved or consumed. From the
standpoint of ordinary people, what matters is not how frugal corrupt elites are
with their stolen money, but the simple fact that they stole it.
Conclusion
This chapter estimates the magnitude of capital flight from Angola, Côte d’Ivoire,
and South Africa, three African countries that feature prominently in total capital
flight from the continent. The chapter also delves into a key mechanism of capital
flight, trade misinvoicing, with a focus on primary commodity exports. The results
show that all three countries suffered substantial losses of capital over the past four
decades, amounting to $329 billion for South Africa, $103 billion for Angola, and
$55 billion for Côte d’Ivoire.
The chronic nature of capital flight from these countries suggests that the phe-
nomenon is driven by structural and institutional factors in both the source
other out, producing no real profits, in which the winning bet serves as the ostensible source of the
funds; fictitious transactions between offshore companies, such as selling goods held in the Geneva
Freeport (or even fictitious items) at inflated prices; and ostensible income from rooms in hotels owned
by the shell company that are actually empty. See Bernstein (2017, pp. 85, 104, 193).
country and the global financial systems that facilitate it. The outflows result in
accumulation of private offshore wealth, some of which was financed by embezzle-
ment of public resources. The results imply that, like many other African countries,
the three are net creditors to the rest of the world in the sense that their assets held
offshore exceed the stock of their external debts. The difference is that the debts
are a liability on the shoulders of the entire population, while the offshore wealth is
private. It follows that strategies to address capital flight must involve measures to
curtail new outflows as well as measures to repatriate the wealth hidden in offshore
financial centers.
To understand more fully the mechanisms of capital flight and to design strate-
gies to combat the hemorrhage of resources from African countries, it is crucial to
examine in detail the actors, conduits, and enablers behind these hidden outflows.
With this in mind, detailed country studies of the type presented in this volume
represent a potentially fruitful avenue for further research.
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Salió á recibirles el hortelano, vejezuelo ochentón, como una
tapia de sordo, quitándose respetuosamente el serón de paja que le
cubría la chola. Y el Doctor, encaminando la voz de modo que fuese
derechita al tímpano, le dirigió la pregunta sacramental: «¿Qué hay
de novedades, Sr. Jacinto?»
—Novedades....—contestó lentamente el patriarca.—
Novedades.... Que el viento tronzó una pola de la cacia de flor...., y
que un vidro de la galería está hecho pedazos...., y que la gallina
pedriscada está clueca...., y que ayer noche mataron á un hombre
en la parroquia.
—¿Mataron á un hombre?—repitió Moragas sin gran sorpresa,
porque sabía la condición belicosa y levantisca de los mozos
erbedanos, y creyó que se trataría de alguna riña de taberna.
—Á la fuerza lo mataron de noche (prosiguió el hortelano,
creyendo que su amo le preguntaba la hora del suceso). Es Román,
el carretero que iba y venía á Marineda con carretos de paja y de
leña, y con sacos de trigo. Apareció esta mañana en el monte de
Sobrás...., ¿ve? allí.... (y el viejo señalaba hacia un punto bastante
próximo). Toda la cabeza le hicieron miajas con una piedra ó sabe
Dios con qué.... Dice que parece un Ceomo....
—Quimera ó robo; nada, sobrevino una pendencia (pensó
Moragas, metiéndose hacia su despacho, deseoso de un par de
horitas de pacífica y jugosa lectura). Mas apenas daba principio á un
capítulo de un libro nuevo de Maudsley, vió entrar despavorida á la
niñera, y pegó un salto en el sillón, temiendo que se tratase de
alguna peripecia ocurrida á Nené.
—¡Señorito, señorito! (Moragas conservaba, no obstante su pelo
blanco, aire muy juvenil, y las criadas le señoriteaban á todo trapo.)
¡Señorito...., asómese...., que ahí va el Juzgado á prender á los que
mataron á ese carretero!
La muchacha hablaba con el tono medroso que adopta la gente
del pueblo para referirse á la Justicia, á la cual nombra con
inflexiones de terror que no tiene quizá para los ladrones ni para los
asesinos.—Moragas se levantó y se asomó á su galería, que
dominaba el camino, fijándose con cierta curiosidad en el grupo.
Iban delante, en malos caballejos, el Juez y el Secretario;
seguíanles á pie dos parejas de la Guardia civil, cuatro hombres de
rostro atezado y militar, de ágiles y airosas piernas bien modeladas
por las polainas de camino; y detrás, á lo que puede llamarse sin
metáfora distancia respetuosa, sobre una docena de aldeanas y
chiquillos, pelotón que iba engrosándose á medida que la comitiva
avanzaba. Moragas conocía al Juez, y aun había asistido en cierta
grave dolencia á un hermano suyo; y al movimiento de cabeza y la
sonrisa con que el representante de la ley le saludó, contestó
vivamente gritando:
—Adiós, Priego.... ¿Quieren Vds. subir y refrescar? ¿Una
botellita de cerveza?
—Tantas gracias.... Ahora, imposible—contestó Priego
deteniendo un instante á su jaco, que no deseaba otra cosa.—Á la
vuelta. Llevamos prisa.
—¿Y.... eso?—preguntó con significativo gesto el Doctor.
—¡Hmmm!—contestó el Juez en tono significativo, que
respondía plenamente á la expresiva interrogación de Moragas,
dando á entender del modo más claro:—«No crea V. que se trata de
un crimen vulgar. Se me figura que hay tela.» Y tocando
rápidamente al sombrero, los dos funcionarios consiguieron de sus
monturas un mediano trotecillo, alejándose el grupo, que, al
desaparecer en la revuelta, dejó, en opinión de Moragas, cierto
silencio extraño en la atmósfera.
Intentó el médico recomenzar la lectura, pero no pudo. Sus ideas
habían tomado otro giro; su fantasía, distraída y excitada, seguía al
grupo, asistiendo á las escenas siempre dramáticas y grotescas á
veces, que acompañan á eso que se llama en lenguaje técnico
levantar el cadáver. Existe en todo hombre, en el menos literato, en
el último burgués, lo que puede llamarse un novelista natural, capaz
de urdir en pocos minutos treinta argumentos complicados y
estrambóticos. Moragas poseía en alto grado esa facultad: tenía de
sobra imaginación, aun dentro de la esfera de sus estudios
profesionales; y, sin ser precisamente de la condición de aquel
individuo que se murió de pena porque al vecino le habían sacado el
chaleco corto, ello es que se interesaba mucho en los asuntos
ajenos, con verdadero interés altruista; no por curiosidad, como
tantos, sino por la condición esencialmente expansiva y generosa de
su carácter. Dos minutos antes, le era indiferente el suceso de la
muerte del carretero Román; pero después de la indicación del
Juez, su fantasía trabajaba sobre el tema del crimen y del enigma
probable que se encerraba en él. Al pronto no se dió cuenta del
verdadero origen de aquella excitación, mas no tardó en
comprender que se relacionaba con el extraño cliente que había
acudido pocas horas antes á su consulta. «Quienquiera que sea el
asesino, valdrá más que aquel tunante. ¡Si yo creyese que es lícito
asesinar científicamente á algún prójimo, lo creería de ese bicho....
que ni prójimo conceptúo siquiera! ¡Así reviente de los malos
hígados que Dios le dió! Pero vamos, que hoy es día de piedra
negra. Aquel individuo por la mañana, y por la tarde este suceso....
que aún no sabemos en que parará.» Para distraerse, Moragas bajó
al jardín, tamaño como un pañuelo, dió vueltas por sus calles, que
más parecían callejones, se enteró del estado de salud de
legumbres y hortalizas, mandó espallerar un pavío, hizo fiestas á
Bismar, se indignó porque dos ó tres insolentes babosas se comían
el fresal con todo el descaro del mundo...., y al mismo tiempo no
cesó de atisbar por la verja el instante en que regresase «la
Justicia».
Un poco antes de la puesta del sol, oyó un vocerío y divisó un
tropel de gente que bajaba por la carretera, en dirección de la
ciudad. Moragas se encaramó al miradorcillo que, desde el ángulo
de la tapia, registraba el camino perfectamente. Abría la marcha,
como siempre, turba de pilluelos descalzos, de esos que van
adonde hay ruido y drama callejero, y que se reclutan lo mismo en
los lavaderos de la Erbeda que en las plazuelas marinedinas:
seguían, graves y ceñudos, los cuatro números de la Benemérita, y
entre ellos caminaba, sueltas las largas trenzas sobre el vestido de
oscuro percal, una mujer joven. Cuando pasaba la comitiva por
debajo del mirador de Moragas, el sol poniente alumbró de lleno la
figura de la presa. Representaba de veintiséis á veintiocho años:
tenía el rostro cubierto de palidez; era menudita de cara y cuerpo,
de facciones delicadas y regulares, de formas cenceñas, y con
cierta pureza de líneas en el contorno del seno, alto y pudoroso,
sobre un talle plano. El pelo muy negro, partido á ambos lados,
alisado sobre las sienes y colgando atrás en dos trenzas, contribuía
á prestarle expresión y aspecto de recato casi místico. Moragas
sintió una impresión profunda de sorpresa. ¿Por qué llevaban entre
Guardias civiles á aquella criatura? ¿Sería posible que fuese una
criminal?
La multitud, que seguía al grupo de los Guardias y la presa, se
componía de gente aldeana. Iban en actitud más triste que hostil,
con caras y actitudes de gente que acompaña á un entierro. Sólo
algunos hombres y algunas viejas cuchicheaban, mostrando
indignación. Había mujeres que alzaban las manos al cielo; otras
señalaban á la presa; muchas volvían la cabeza hacia atrás,
mirando al objeto que cerraba la comitiva: uno de esos carros del
país, de primitiva forma, con rueda sin radios, que caminaba
lentamente, al paso de la yunta de bueyes rojizos, muy animados
por la carga relativamente tan ligera. En efecto, detrás de la
armazón de entretejidos mimbres que otras veces serviría para
retener el carreto de arena ó piedra, no se distinguía sino un bulto
de poca alzada, cubierto con groseros paños; Moragas no necesitó
mirarlo dos veces para conocer que era un cuerpo humano, un
cuerpo muerto.... Ni en los paños, ni alrededor del bulto, ni por parte
alguna se veía mancha ni señal de sangre, y, sin embargo, Moragas
creía notar en todo el carro un tono bermejo.... Era que el sol se
ponía, y su luz oblicua inflamaba cuanto tocase....
Ya había desaparecido la turba en la revuelta del camino; ya no
se oían sus voces, y aún Moragas no se había meneado del
mirador. Le dejara profundamente pensativo aquella muchacha, tan
débil, tan dulce en apariencia, llevada á la cárcel entre una
muchedumbre acusadora. El aspecto de la mujer le había
despertado viva curiosidad, parecidísima al interés. Tenemos, ó, por
mejor decir, tienen las personas del carácter de Moragas, de esos
chispazos compasivos, que con repentina vehemencia se apoderan
del alma. Moragas era lo que en la época de Rousseau se llamó
hombre sensible, y lo que hoy nuestro endurecimiento nombra, con
cierto matiz de desdén, persona impresionable. Su profesión
dolorosa, lejos de embotarle la sensibilidad, se la refinaba cada día.
Con la misma vivacidad con que había arrojado por la ventana los
dos duros de la consulta de Rojo, hubiese bajado entonces.... ¿á
qué? Á cometer la ridiculez de ofrecer un refresco, una moneda, un
consejo, una sonrisa, algo que tuviese forma consoladora, á aquella
mujer tan pálida, de mirada tan fija, de labios tan convulsivamente
apretados, de tan modesto porte....
Diez ó doce minutos hacía que ni el polvo levantado por la
comitiva se veía flotar en la atmósfera, cuando Moragas descendió
de su observatorio, porque se oía el trotecillo de dos jacos, y no
dudó que fuesen las monturas del Juez y del Secretario, los cuales
volverían cumplida su tarea de iniciar las diligencias sumariales. Así
era en efecto: el trote se detuvo ante la puerta de la quinta, y los
funcionarios descabalgaron prontamente. El Doctor comprendió que
aceptaban el refresco, del que debían de estar bien necesitados, y
al tiempo que salía á recibir á sus huéspedes, llamó á la niñera,
dando órdenes para que la cerveza, la grosella, los pasteles, que
por fortuna había traído de Marineda calentitos, se sirviesen en la
mesa de piedra del cenador.
Entró el Juez con sobrealiento de hombre rendido de fatiga,
limpiándose el sudor de la frente, y más serio y preocupado que
antes. Era rubio, grueso, flemático, jovial, y no solía ahogarse en
poca agua, por donde Moragas infirió que lo que así le preocupaba
tenía que revestir verdadera gravedad. Al encontrarse en el cenador,
donde corría un fresco deleitoso, y los jazmines olían
regaladamente, y la cerveza sonreía en el limpio tanque, la
fisonomía de Priego se sosegó y aclaró, y exclamando, como lo
haría cualquiera en su caso, «¡Uff!», se derrocó en el banco de
madera rústica, y contestó á lo que preguntaba su huésped, más
con los ojos que con la lengua.
—Pues.... ¡cosa gorda.... gorda! Ó mucho me engaño, ó este
crimen va á dar que hablar, no sólo aquí sino en la prensa de la
corte.... ¡Ay, qué agradecido quedo á esta bebida! He sudado el
quilo, y como no era cosa de que el Juez se pusiese á refrescar con
vino en la taberna.... Sí, yo también pensé, al recibir el parte, que se
trataba de una riña....; aquí son el pan nuestro de cada día, porque
no he visto gente más dispuesta á andar á estacazos que la de
estas parroquias. Pero ya desde que tomé los primeros vientos
comprendí que era algo más.... Y á la verdad me hizo poca gracia,
porque si los periódicos dan en jalear estas cosas, raro es el juez
que sale bien librado. Que si fué, que si vino, que si debió hacer
esto ó lo otro.... Y á nadie le gusta salir á pública vergüenza. ¡Señor!
Esta cerveza conforta.
—Y la mujer que va presa, ¿qué papel juega en todo ello?—
preguntó con afán Moragas.
—¡Una friolera! ¿La ha visto V. tan.... así.... que parece que no
rompe un plato? Pues ó mucho me engaño.... ó es autora material....
ó por lo menos coautora é instigadora del crimen. Es la mujer del
muerto...., mejor dicho la viuda del interfecto,—añadió Priego
festivamente, empezando á mascullar un pastelillo de hojaldre.
Moragas se había quedado pensativo.
—¿Dice V. que esa mujer?....
—¡Como V. la ve! Por ahora, en rigor, es prematuro todo cuanto
se diga; y sin embargo, apostaría yo mi toga á que fué ella.
—¿Ella sola? ¿Cree V. que ella sola habrá asesinado al marido?
—Sola, no. El amante debe de ser cómplice.
—¿Hay amante?
—Ya lo creo. En las aldeas, si V. escarba bien, salen sapos y
culebras, lo mismo que en las grandes capitales. Somos de igual
pasta aquí ó acullá. Hay amante, y lo mejor del caso es que parece
ser un cuñado.... uno que estuvo casado con la propia hermana del
muerto. Yo no he tomado aún declaración á nadie, más que á la
mujer que va presa, la cual, por ahora, no ha contestado sino
vaguedades; yo tampoco insistí mucho; todo se andará, y al
principio se debe tantear más que ahondar; pero los civiles habían
charlado con las comadres de la aldea, y desde que me informaron
de que ella y el cuñado.... (Priego juntó las yemas de los índices),
dije yo para mí...., tate, aquí tenemos el hilo.
—¿Y ha preso V. al cuñado?
—Se le busca.... Ya caerá. El tunante, por aparentar, dijo ayer
que se marchaba de la parroquia, que iba á Marineda á no sé qué
diligencias y menesteres.... y en vez de marcharse á la noche, se
largó de madrugada, realizado ya el gatuperio.... La hazaña
(prosiguió el Juez, comprendiendo por la fisonomía de Moragas que
oía con avidez los detalles) debió de suceder ayer noche, cuando
Román el carretero volvía de llevar un carreto de arena á dos
leguas, al alto de Chouzas. Á la cuenta, él solía venir algo peneque.
No sé cómo harían el pájaro y la pájara para sacarlo de casa y
convencerlo de que se fuese al montecito, donde lo despacharon á
hachazos, deshaciéndole la cabeza....
—La tiene terrible (confirmó el Secretario). Parece una sandía
machacada.... Lo que á mí me llama la atención es ver allí tan poca
sangre, cuando debía estar inundado el suelo....
—Eso es raro (indicó Moragas). Me huele á que lo matarían en
otro sitio.... Verdad que por ahora....
—Estamos empezando, Sr. Moragas; estamos empezando
(respondió el Juez, que no empezaba, sino que acababa de atizarse
el segundo tanque del Gallo). Ahora también les toca á Vds. emitir
dictamen.... Ahí va la víctima, en su propio carro, á que le hagan en
Marineda el debido reconocimiento y una autopsia formal.... Y en
poniendo á buen recaudo la pájara y el pájaro, ellos cantarán y todo
saldrá á relucir.... Advierta V. que no hace seis horas que he tenido
conocimiento del caso (añadió el Juez, que no se hallaba,
realmente, muy descontento de sí mismo y de su penetración y
sagacidad para coger desde luego una pista).
—¿Y.... ella?—preguntó Moragas que no perdía de vista á la
acusada.
—Ella...., ella, tan agua mansita y tan modosa como V. la ve,
debe de tener un rejo de mil diablos. Estaba tranquila, igual que V.
está ahí, rodeada de dos ó tres vecinas que la acompañaban, desde
que se descubrió el cadáver, y sin echar ni una lágrima. Tampoco
las echó cuando la interrogué apretándola un poco, y cuando ordené
la detención. Á mis preguntas ha contestado sin fanfarronería, sin
miedo, sin precipitación, con una calma asombrosa, diciendo que su
marido volvió anoche á la hora de costumbre; que cenaron en paz;
que la mandó acostarse, diciendo que él tenía que salir, y que
dejase la puerta entornada; y que, como muchas noches se
entretenía en la taberna, ella se durmió, y sólo á la madrugada, al
despertarse, echó de menos al marido, sabiendo á cosa de las once
que había aparecido muerto en el pinar.—Le digo á V. que la
individua....
—¿Tiene hijos ese matrimonio?
—Sí: una chiquilla de tres años.... Su abuela queda encargada
de ella....
—Y V. cree que ella y el cuñado fueron los autores.... ¿y para
qué?
—¡Bah! ¿Para qué había de ser? (exclamó riendo el funcionario.)
¡Parece mentira que V. haya sido despensero antes que guardián!
Para que nadie les estorbase; para verse libres y campar por sus
respetos.
El médico movió la cabeza. El crimen se le aparecía como un
drama vulgar del adulterio; pero no pensaba lo mismo de la heroína,
en la cual olfateaba algo extraño, algo digno de aquel misterioso
interés que sentía despertarse en su mente de observador y de
curioso del espíritu. Acaso influía bastante en esta disposición de su
alma, la coincidencia de haber visto y hablado, por la mañana, al
hombre que probablemente desenlazaría el drama, apretando el
gaznate y deshaciendo las vértebras de aquella mujer tan joven y de
tan apacible aspecto: perspectiva que tenía la virtud de hacer saltar
á Moragas. ¡La sola idea de ver alzarse el cadalso, y para una
mujer, le ofendía como un ultraje hecho á su misma persona!
Nervioso ya, preguntó á Priego:
—Y esa mujer.... ¿irá al palo?
—No creo (respondió el Juez con cierta entonación clemente).—
Yo supongo que autora, lo que es autora.... El guisado lo haría el
querido. Ella sacará la inmediata. Y confiese V. que la merece.
Algo iba á contestar Moragas, que pensaba sobre el particular
muchas cosas, pero le cortaron la palabra sus huéspedes,
levantándose como el que tiene prisa de marchar. Vió el Doctor al
través de la verja que estaba enganchado su coche, y propuso á los
funcionarios llevarles á Marineda. Siempre irían mejor que en un
penco de alquiler, y ganando tiempo: así como así, él aún tenía que
hacer alguna visita antes de cenar. Accedieron; fiaron sus monturas
á un espolista; subieron al cochecillo, que empezó á rodar con
sosiego; y la divina paz de la tarde; la hermosura de la ría que se
divisaba á lo lejos teñida de carmín por el último y ya expirante
reflejo del sol; la quietud del viento; la frescura de primavera y de
verdor temprano que enviaban los campos en plena germinación;
las madrugadoras enredaderas que, ya algo floridas, se asomaban á
las tapias de las quintas de recreo...., todo fué causa de que ni
Moragas ni sus acompañantes volviesen á mentar el crimen, que
parecía profanación de la sagrada hermosura de la naturaleza.
Rendida por una tarde de rusticación, llena de polvo, con manchas
en el traje, y barro en aquellos calcetines tan monos, Nené dormía.
VII
La Marinera salió, dándose toda la prisa que le permitían sus
pies guiados por sus casi inválidos ojos, mientras el padre se
esforzaba en desnudar al herido. Quitóle la ropa exterior con el
esmero imaginable, dejándole sólo la rota camisa; y por medio de
pañuelos y ropa blanca que desgarraba, estancó como pudo la
sangre que manchaba la frente y el cuello del guerrero vencido.
Durante estas operaciones, Telmo se quejaba sordamente. Pero al
querer descalzarle el borceguí del pie derecho, fué un grito tan
agudo y lastimero el que lanzó la criatura, que Rojo se detuvo, sin
resolverse á terminar la operación.
—¿Te duele mucho, rapaz? ¿Te duele mucho?—preguntóle
afanosamente.
No contestó el muchacho, volviendo á su amodorramiento febril.
Indudablemente no estaba su cabeza para discursos, ni su lengua
para explicaciones. Sólo al cabo de dos ó tres largos minutos,
balbuceó la exclamación de todos los maltratados, de todas las
víctimas:
—¡Agua, agua!.... Tengo sed.
El padre llenó un vaso y lo acercó á los labios del niño, que bebió
con ansia, dejando caer otra vez sobre la almohada la frente. Rojo
apoyó en ella la mano.... Temperatura altísima, sequedad y aridez
de la piel invadida por la calentura. Buscó Rojo una silla, la colocó á
la cabecera, y la ocupó alterado y sombrío. Por dentro sentía una
ternura, un delirio de doloroso afecto, que le ahogaban; pero la
manifestación de aquel íntimo sentimiento, tan natural en la
paternidad, era ruda, concentrada, como todo en él.
Tascando el freno de la impaciencia que aguija al que á la
cabecera de un ser amado aguarda al médico y con él la
certidumbre, quizá la salvación, Rojo meditaba sobre el suceso, y
entreveía en él una nueva humillación agregada al ya innumerable
catálogo de las que le habían ulcerado el espíritu. Sólo que ésta
dolía más, porque daba en la carne viva, en el sentimiento que,
enérgico y soberano hasta en la fiera montés, es en el hombre más
fuerte que la muerte,—porque es amor.
¿Por qué le habían apedreado á su niño? ¿Era razón desahogar
en Telmo los odios que infundía Juan Rojo? ¿Era justo dejar al
muchacho, agonizando, bañado en sangre, en un lugar desierto?
¿Qué daño hacía á nadie la criatura? ¿No habría para ella perdón,
olvido, indulgencia? ¿No era Telmo una persona como las demás?
¿Por qué le ponían fuera de la ley—hasta el extremo de matarle á
pedradas?
Interrumpió estas reflexiones el rodar de un carruaje, que
resonaba sobre el seco piso de la carretera como sobre sonoro
pavimento de metal, y la voz de la Marinera, apresurada, loca de
júbilo, resonó gritando:
—Señor Rojo.... ¡Gracias á la Virgen de la Guardia! ¡Ay qué
suerte! ¡Dar yo la vuelta por la calle del Peñascal, pasar delante de
la capilla de la Angustia.... y oir rodar el coche del Sr. de Moragas!
¡Ay qué chillido di! Me agarré á la puerta del coche.... conté lo que
pasaba.... Y el Sr. de Moragas, como es tan humano, en seguidita
mandó dar vuelta al cochero.... ¡Alabada sea la Virgen! Le he de
rezar hoy mismo tres Salves.
Apeábase ya Moragas de su cansada berlinita, saltando con
movimiento vivo y juvenil, y atravesando la puerta del rancho sin
mirar siquiera á Rojo, fuese derecho á la cama en que Telmo yacía,
diciendo con voz alta, animada, cariñosa, de médico que al entrar en
casa de los pobres sabe que debe ante todo consolar al afligido:
—¿Qué pasa? ¿Quién se ha perniquebrado? ¿Un niño?
Travesuritas, ¿eh? Ahora arreglaremos esa cabeza rota.
Inclinábase ya hacia el doliente, cuando la luz que Rojo había
descolgado y aproximado alumbró de lleno el rostro del padre. Es
indecible el asombro que expresó el de Moragas al reconocer á su
cliente de por la mañana, al de los dos duros tirados á la calle. Ira,
pasmo, menosprecio, chispearon en sus redondas pupilas, que
giraron con furor, en las finas múltiples arrugas de su frente, en su
abierta boca, en sus puños instantáneamente crispados.—«¡Usted,
usted!»,—repitió con las variadas expresiones de los sentimientos
que le agitaban.... Y serenándose de pronto por la misma fuerza de
su cólera, y mirando al niño que gemía opacamente y al padre que
bajaba los ojos y quería ocultarse, pronunció en tono grave é
incisivo:
—El niño, ¿es de V.?
—Mío, sí.... Es mi hijo,—declaró Rojo con apagada y terrosa voz.
—Pues esa es la peor enfermedad de cuantas pueden
sobrevenirle, y esa, ni se la curo yo, ni se la cura nadie,—replicó el
médico volviendo la espalda y dirigiéndose hacia la puerta.
Aún no había dado tres pasos, cuando sintió que una mano se
atornillaba al faldón de su levita, atirantándolo de un modo violento.
Volvióse con repugnancia; miró de alto á abajo á Rojo como se mira
á un sapo muy feo, y dijo, vibrando las palabras cual otros tantos
restallidos de tralla:
—No me toque V., ó haré un desatino. Ya bastó el atrevimiento
de por la mañana. Los duros que dejó V. sobre mi mesa los arrojé á
la calle, por no conservar nada en que V. hubiese puesto las manos.
Rojo soltó al Doctor; pero dando rápida vuelta, maniobró de
suerte que vino, colocándose delante, á caer á sus pies sin decir
palabra. Moragas se detuvo. El niño gemía.
—Está muy malito. Herido. No sé qué tiene roto en su cuerpo. Sr.
D. Pelayo, ¡por el alma de su madre!
Don Pelayo siguió ganando terreno hacia la puerta, pero en ella
encontró otro obstáculo: la Marinera, que le apostrofaba con
energía.
—Señor, caridad. La caridad no distingue de personas, señor. Y
el inocente no tiene la culpa de nada. Dios, nuestro Señor, nos
manda caridad hasta con los perros.
Moragas luchaba consigo mismo; no entre encontrados
sentimientos, que es lucha fácil, casi elemental, sino entre
sentimientos análogos, todos amasados con aquella generosidad
semi-quijotesca y semi-filantrópica que, diga lo que quiera el vulgo,
no está reñida con las tendencias positivas del científico. Abandonar
á un enfermo, parecíale, dentro de su profesión, monstruoso; y
detenerse en aquella casa, cuidar al enfermo aquel, era, en su
entender, una degradación, una especie de estigma que debía verse
después en las manos. Moragas había prodigado los socorros de su
ciencia á personas bien viles. Sabía de memoria las huellas
hediondas que marca el vicio en el cuerpo del disoluto y de la
ramera. Aunque hombre delicado en su vida interior y en el pulcro
aseo de su persona, jamás había retrocedido ante ninguna
enfermedad, por repulsiva que fuese: y al asistir á la humanidad
doliente, gracias á una maravillosa analgesia, hija de la firme
voluntad—esa analgesia que hacía decir á un santo que las llagas
del leproso huelen á rosas—perdía el sentido del olfato, dominaba
los del tacto y de la vista, y prescindía de la laceria para
consagrarse enteramente al deber. Por primera vez retrocedía ante
una llaga moral, y su imaginación viva redoblaba la impresión de
horror, que, de puro violenta, llegaba ya á parecerle ridícula. De
todas suertes, en el carácter de Moragas, no cabía que durase
aquella lucha; de no haberse marchado en los primeros momentos,
no se iría; y el pretexto para flaquear se lo dió la Marinera,
insistiendo y repitiendo con una especie de severidad respetuosa:
—¡Ay, señor!... ¿pero va á dejar al inocente? Señor, Dios no
manda eso. Mire que es una crueldad semejante porte.
—¿Es V. madre de ese niño?—preguntó Moragas.
—¡Ay! ¡no señor, alabado sea Dios!—contestó espontánea y
vivamente la Marinera.—Mi marido es un hombre de bien, botero del
Muelle....
Á su pesar sonrió Moragas; se estiró los puños, canturreó, y
como el que se determina pensando «pecho al agua» se dirigió al
catre del herido.—Con la pericia del veterano en estos penosos
reconocimientos, comprobó muy en breve que el chico tenía rota la
cabeza por dos partes; y descalzándole sin hacer caso de sus
lamentos, advirtió que estaba dislocado el tobillo. De contusiones y
magulladuras no se ocupó: eran numerosas, pero sin mayor
importancia. Lesión interna no parecía que la hubiese, pero sí fiebre
altísima. La Marinera alumbraba, y Rojo, inmóvil y como
estupefacto, esperaba el desenlace.
—¿Cómo ha ocurrido esto? (preguntó el médico interrumpiendo
su tarea.) ¿Han sido pedradas, ó se ha caído además?
—¡Si no lo sabemos! (exclamó Rojo consternado.) Yo tuve
noticia de que el niño estaba en el castillo de San Wintila, muy
maltratado.... fuí, lo recogí, lo traje en brazos, y no le he podido
sacar nada sobre el lance.
—Debió de ser una pedrea,—advirtió la Marinera.
—Sí, pero hay magulladuras en todo el cuerpo.... Ha caído de
alto, no cabe duda,—advirtió el médico sin dejar de palpar al
muchacho.
Cuando, terminada la cura, puestas las vendas, reducida la
luxación, Moragas se enderezó exhalando un «¡uf!» de cansancio
evidente, entonces—sólo entonces—se aproximó Rojo al médico, y
con honda ansiedad le preguntó:
—¿Quedará cojo el muchacho? ¿Quedará resentido del pecho?
Moragas se volvió y por primera vez desde que conocía la
condición social de su cliente, le miró cara á cara, como se miran
unos á otros los seres humanos.
La casualidad le mostraba al hombre excluido del concierto
social bajo el aspecto más capaz de conmover las fibras de su alma,
aunque sólo fuese por analogía de sentimiento. ¡Moragas, el mayor
padrazo de Marineda, el enamorado de la niñez, el derrochador de
juguetes y confites, el hombre que después de una traqueotomía
había mezclado sus lágrimas con las de la familia de la operada
criatura!
Aquel fué el primer instante en que los sentimientos de Moragas,
que tanto habían de influir en el destino de Juan Rojo, sufrieron un
cambio de posición, giraron sobre su eje, por decirlo así, y á la
indignación y al horror de algunas horas antes reemplazó una
especie de interés extraño, de esa fascinación que la misma
repugnancia produce, y que se asemeja á la vocación del casto
apóstol que entra en una casa de perdición á convertir meretrices;
porque la suma piedad va al sumo mal.—No era la primera vez que
advertía Moragas esa propensión, que él calificaba
humorísticamente de manía redentorista. Le había costado por
cierto la tal propensión graves disgustos, comprobaciones penosas
de negras ingratitudes, enredos gratuitos, molestias sin cuento y
desazones magnas.... Lo menos que le había costado, costándole
bastante, era dinero y tiempo. Sin embargo, al menor pretexto, la
inclinación resurgía en Moragas, y la perpetua ilusión del
redentorismo volvía á presentársele vestida con todos los adornos y
galas que de ordinario ostentan nuestros sueños. «Si yo (pensaba el
Doctor) acierto á nacer en la Edad Media, época en que las
deficiencias del estado social y del organismo jurídico dejaban
abierto tanto camino á la iniciativa individual, ¡sabe Dios lo que
hubiese podido hacer! Pero en la sociedad presente, no cabe duda
que esta bobería de sentir como propios los males ajenos, de
meterme en lo que ni me da ni me quita, se parece mucho al oficio
de enderezar tuertos y desfacer agravios que ya ridiculizó
Cervantes.»
Al advertir que la condición y estado de Rojo ¡de Rojo!
provocaban en él los primeros síntomas de la conocida enfermedad,
el redentor se rió de sí mismo. «Moraguitas, esto es el acabóse.
Ahora te ha dado por compadecerte de este sujeto. Ya has llegado
al límite extremo de la chifladura benéfica, hijo. No, pues aquí sí que
no te suelto yo la rienda. Á este hombre no es lícito ni considerarle
como hombre. Si quieres interesarte por algo raro y estupendo,
interésate enhorabuena por la parricida á quien viste pasar hoy,
entre civiles, por la carretera. ¡Esa podrá ser una criminal, y
admitamos, desde luego, que lo es; pero criminal en caliente....,
criminal pasional, que al delinquir obró, sin duda, por irresistible
impulso, sin importarle que al otro lado del foso que iba á saltar
estuviese la expiación de una muerte afrentosa....! Esa mujer,
Moraguitas, es una enferma como otra cualquiera de las que
asistes.... Ahí se explica y se justifica la compasión.... Pero con el tío
este, que á sangre fría y á mansalva ha tomado por oficio matar.... Á
éste, como á una víbora se le debía aplastar la cabeza.»
Mientras Moragas discurría así, Rojo repitió la pregunta:
—¿Quedará cojo? ¿Imposibilitado?
—No,—contestó el médico en voz severa.—Ni quedará
imposibilitado, ni cojo. Más que las lesiones, me preocupa el estado
general.... Voy á ponerle á V. unas recetas....
Apareció por allí un recado de escribir, no tan malo ni tan
descabalado como era de temer en aquel tugurio, y Moragas
escribió sus fórmulas. No se oía en la habitación más que el
angustiado respirar del padre y el quejido sordo del enfermo, al cual
se acercó el Doctor, sorprendido de que la cura, en vez de calmarle,
pareciese haberle producido más desasosiego, mayor inquietud.
—Convendría que no se moviese, por la dislocación....—observó
Moragas.—Pero, ¿quién le sujeta? Con esa calentura de caballo....
Aguarde V..... Ya delira.
Telmo, en efecto, se agitaba en la cama, y su inarticulado gemir
se convertía en palabras articuladas penosamente, aunque claras y
expresivas. El Doctor prestó oído.
—Soy valiente,—afirmaba Telmo.—¿Quién es el que me llama
cobardón? Embusteros.... Veréis si.... Tirar, que aguardo.... Os
desdeñáis de mí, porque.... ¡Piedras y más piedras, contra!.... Soy
hombre para todos.... Los cobardes vosotros.... Venga de ahí....
¡pedrea!.... Yo solo....
—¿Qué dice?—preguntó el padre.
—¡Bah!—respondió Moragas.—Por lo visto se han reunido
muchos chiquillos para apedrearle.... Lo que era de esperar.... ¡No
se quede V. tan espantado, hombre!—añadió irónicamente,
cediendo otra vez á la malevolencia.—¿Cómo? ¿no encuentra V.
muy natural que la humanidad le apedree en la persona de su
hijo?....
—¡Es una maldad!—exclamó sordamente Rojo, apoyándose en
la pared y escondiendo la faz demudada.—Que me apedreen á
mí...., santo y bueno...., es decir...., tampoco....; pero, en fin, de
apedrear.... Lo que es al chiquillo...., ¡valiente cochinada, señor de
Moragas!, y V. me perdonará que me exprese con esta franqueza....,
¡valiente indecencia de esos pilletes sucios!
—Bien, hombre.... V. creía que no había más que echar hijos al
mundo, y que luego, aunque V..... Caramba con el hombre este....
—Pero, señor,—intervino con fuego la Marinera.—el inocente
¿por qué ha de pagar? ¡Sólo unos corazones negros hacen eso,
señor!
—Ea, déjense de historias,—ordenó el médico con hastío.—
Denle eso que dice ahí, que rebajará la calentura.... Busquen
limones ó naranjas, y que beba, que beba sin tasa naranjada
fresca.... Humedecerle con el árnica disuelta los vendajes.... Nada
de comida.... ¿eh?, ni un caldo, ni cosa ninguna.... Cuidadito....
Rojo, humilde y cabizbajo, murmuró llegándose al Doctor:
—Señor de Moragas, yo no le puedo pagar.... Es decir, que no
tengo medios...., porque V., si á mano viene no querrá...., vamos....,
tomar la pobreza que yo pueda darle.... Por el alma de su padre no
se enfade.... Si yo lo que le pido es que no me deje al rapaz
abandonado.... Si supiese que mañana había de volver....
Moragas titubeó un instante. Al fin prevaleció el impulso.
—Volveré,—contestó con firmeza.—Se lo prometo. Mañana, al
anochecer.
Y en el momento de reclinarse en el rincón de su berlinita, antes
que el cochero tocase con la fusta á la yegua, Moragas oyó una voz
de mujer, que decía fervorosamente, como rezando:
—¡Dios y la Virgen de la Guardia le conserven la niñita! D.
Pelayo, hoy gana el cielo. ¡Nuestro Señor lo acompañe, que
tampoco nuestro Señor se desdeñaba de persona ninguna de este
mundo!
Era la Marinera quien hablaba así.... Moragas sacó la cabeza, y
para poner coto á las bendiciones de la infeliz, contestó con gracejo
y picardía:
—Adiós, cacho de buena moza.
VIII
Despertóse la capital marinedina comentando, rumiando,
desfigurando,—iba á decir saboreando la noticia del crimen de la
Erbeda, si no me pareciese calumnia, porque realmente los
marinedinos no son tan ávidos de emociones fuertes como los
parisienses, y el malsano gusto de la sangre y del cieno les subleva
el paladar. Algo, no obstante, habían conseguido estragarlo la
creciente invasión de la sección criminal en la prensa de la Corte, el
noticierismo que registra al día, y con minuciosidad digna de más
alto objeto, los pasos, movimientos, actos y dichos más insulsos y
vulgares del criminal sujeto á la acción de la ley, desde que la fuerza
pública le echa el guante, hasta que los hermanos de la Paz y
Caridad depositan en el nicho sus despojos.
El vulgo de Marineda, como el vulgo de todas partes, había ido,
gracias á la prensa, acostumbrándose á la terminología jurídica y
penal, á cierta crítica aguda de la ley y de sus representantes é
intérpretes, crítica que, si no ponía el dedo en la llaga, era por lo
menos indicio de ese descontento social que clama por renovación,
pidiendo agua fresca de nuevos manantiales. Andaba mezclado en
este movimiento de la opinión marinedina, como en todos los
movimientos de la opinión, algo de mecánico y pueril y algo de
inspirado y fecundo; combinación que, transformada en instinto,
ayuda sin saberlo á los verdaderos precursores conscientes de la
marcha progresiva de la humanidad.
Ello es que aquella mañana, con la primera luz diurna; con las
primeras devotas que madrugaron á oir las misas de los Jesuítas;
con los primeros barrenderos que, mal despiertos aún, comenzaron
á adecentar las calles y expulsar de ellas á canes y gatos
errabundos; con las primeras mujerucas de las cercanías, de cesta
en ruedo, que despertaron á los vigilantes de consumos para
abonarles la alcabela; con las primeras criadas ó amas hacendosas
que salieron á aprovechar la comprita de temprano; con los primeros
lulos que desatracaron para inquietar á la sardina y á la merluza;

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On the Trail of Capital Flight from

Africa: The Takers and the Enablers

Flight of the Hawk The River Gear

Flight of the Hawk: The Plains W. Michael Gear

Flight of the Hawk: The Plains W. Michael Gear

The Hidden Barriers and Enablers of Team-Based Ideation

The Last Flight Julie Clark

The Last Flight Julie Clark

History of South Africa: From 1902 to the Present Thula

The Hijacking of American Flight 119 John Wigger

2.1. Capital flight from Angola 18

ACE Audit Contrôle et Expertise

CPC Customs Processing Center

NEPC Nigerian Export Promotion Council

Adam Aboobaker, Lecturer in Economics, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

1 McKinsey Global Institute (2010).

nevertheless seems to flow upstream, fleeing Africa towards lower-return markets

Why Care about Capital Flight?

Why Case Studies?

Why Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, and South Africa?

of petroleum has suffocated the development of other economic sectors while

Structure of the Book

problem of capital flight is considered as a central pillar of the agenda of mobilizing

Definitions, Methodology, and Data

Capital flight as a subset of illicit financial flows

1 Details can be found in Ndikumana and Boyce (2019).

Because capital flight from Africa is a transnational phenomenon involving shared

Capital flight as a balance of payments residual

Measuring capital flight is a challenging exercise because it is by nature a hid-

Adjustment for trade misinvoicing

The BoP data on trade transactions may be subject to erroneous or deliberate

⁵ The International Debt Statistics (IDS) database is available at https://databank.worldbank.

Measuring trade misinvoicing

The measurement of trade misinvoicing is based on data from the Direction of

Motivations for trade misinvoicing

⁸ The Direction of Trade Statistics database is available at http://www.imf.org/en/data.

Financial motives: Exporters and importers may engage in misinvoicing to min-

Methodological and data issues

The estimation of trade misinvoicing faces a number of issues related to method-

1986–89 1990–99 2000–09 2010–18 1970–2018

CDEBTADJ 9.1 10.0 12.4 39.0 70.5

Memorandum: total private capital flows

1970–79 1980–89 1990–99 2000–09 2010–18 1970–2018

CDEBTADJ 14.0 22.2 7.9 0.5 7.5 52.0

Memorandum: total private capital flows

Source: Authors’ computations (for method, see text).

Partner Ivorian exports Partner imports cif factor Export misinvoicing

Belgium 4463.4 4734.7 1.064 −13.5

* USA imports reported at fob value.

1970–79 1980–89 1990–99 2000–09 2010–18 1970–2018

CDEBTADJ 3.9 22.5 10.6 68.2 110.5 215.7

Memorandum: total private capital flows

* Trade misinvoicing not available for 1970–89.

Table 2.5 Non-monetary gold export misinvoicing in South Africa, 2000–2018

Partner South Partner cif factor Export

Hong Kong 2.7 30.3 1.002 27.6

1⁷ We apportion reported exports to non-specified destinations between developed and developing

Table 2.6 Platinum export misinvoicing in South Africa, 2001–2018 (billion,

Partner South Partner cif factor Export

China 2.6 24.2 1.026 21.5

* USA imports reported at fob value.

From Unrecorded Outflows to Unrecorded Offshore Wealth

on increasing foreign aid, as is typical in international discourse, the focus should

Measurement of hidden offshore wealth