Raymond Baker is the Director of Global Financial Integrity and the author of Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System, published by John Wiley & Sons and cited by the Financial Times as one of the “best business books of 2005.” He has for many years been an internationally respected authority on corruption, money laundering, growth, and foreign policy issues, particularly as they concern developing and transitional economies and impact upon western economic and foreign interests. He has written and spoken extensively, testified often before legislative committees in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, been quoted worldwide, and has commented frequently on television and radio in the United States, Europe, and Asia on legislative matters and policy questions, including appearances on Nightline, CNN, BBC, NPR, Four Corners, and GloboNews, among others.

Mr. Baker is a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., researching and writing on the linkages between corruption, money laundering, and poverty. In 1996 he received a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for a project entitled, “Flight Capital, Poverty and Free-Market Economics.” He traveled to 23 countries to interview 335 central bankers, commercial bankers, government officials, economists, lawyers, tax collectors, security officers, and sociologists on the relationships between bribery, commercial tax evasion, money laundering, and economic growth. From 1985 to 1996 Mr. Baker provided confidential economic advisory services at the presidential level for developing country governments. Activities focused principally on issues surrounding anti-corruption strategies, international terms of trade, and developing country debt. Research was conducted with 550 business owners and managers in eleven countries, concerning import and export mispricing and movement of tax-evading capital.

From 1976 to 1985 Mr. Baker conducted extensive trading activities throughout Latin America and in ten Asian countries including the People’s Republic of China. An affiliated company in London handled transactions in Europe. From 1961 to 1976 he lived in Nigeria and established and managed an investment company which set up and acquired manufacturing and financing ventures, the subject of two Harvard Business School case studies. Educated at Harvard Business School and Georgia Institute of Technology, Mr. Baker is the author of “The Biggest Loophole in the Free-Market System,” “Illegal Flight Capital; Dangers for Global Stability,” “How Dirty Money Binds the Poor,” and other works published in the United States and Europe.

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