Stiglitz quits Panama Papers committee over transparency row

August 07, 2016 15:23

Nobel-winning US economist Joseph Stiglitz and Swiss anti-corruption expert Mark Pieth have said that a dispute over transparency had prompted them to quit a panel on reforming Panama's finance sector.

The pair resigned on Friday from the committee, which the Panamanian government set up in a declared bid to reform the country's tarnished financial services after the "Panama Papers" scandal erupted in April.

Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York who won the Nobel Prize in 2001, told AFP yesterday that he was "shocked" and "very disappointed." The pair had been "very reluctant to resign," he said.

"In our first meeting we made it clear that we couldn't proceed unless there was a commitment from the government to make our report public and it refused to make that commitment," he said.

"We were just shocked. How could you have a committee on transparency that itself was not going to be transparent?"

In a statement, Stiglitz and Pieth said they believed restrictions on defining the scope of their work, on speaking freely and on guarantees that the report would be released were "tantamount to censorship."

In April, media outlets published details of murky offshore financial dealings gleaned from 11.5 million leaked documents from a Panamanian law firm -- the so-called "Panama Papers."

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