Global Financial Integrity, press release, Syria Lost US$23.6 Billion in Illicit Financial Outflows from 2000-2009, Says Forthcoming GFI Report, 1 December 2011
Source ID
SRC-041
Citation
Global Financial Integrity, press release, Syria Lost US$23.6 Billion in Illicit Financial Outflows from 2000-2009, Says Forthcoming GFI Report, 1 December 2011
URL or path
research/Syria Lost US$23.6 Billion in Illicit Financial Outflows from 2000-2009, Says Forthcoming GFI Report - Global Financial Integrity.pdf
Type
Press release
Hierarchy tier
5
Published
2011-12-01
Accessed
2026-08-12
Snapshot
Supplied by the author and opened 10 August 2026. 3 pages, text layer present
Claims
CH2-002, CH2-003
Status
READ
Version history
The register keeps changing after the book is fixed in print. Each entry below was added to this row in the order shown.
RETIERED 11 August 2026 under D-028 against EVIDENCE_PROTOCOL's six-level source hierarchy. The previous value was an ad hoc quality score on an undocumented scale. Tier now records SOURCE TYPE only; how far this project has checked the document is the Status column. Previous value: tier 2. THIS CLOSES THE CASE THE DRAFT DECLINED TO MAKE, and it is stronger than the draft anticipated. Four findings. ONE: the release leads with the high-end figure in its headline and never mentions the other. The conservative US$15.3 billion appears nowhere; searched 15.3, 15,288, normaliz, conservative and high-end across all three pages, zero occurrences of each. So the range the report publishes in Table 9 is not a range in the release. It is a point. TWO: the per-capita derivation is here, and here is where it exists. Verbatim: In a country with a per capita GDP of just US$2,891 in 2010, these outflows represent a loss of US$1,048 for every Syrian citizen. The phrase per capita occurs zero times in the 100-page report and once here. THREE, AND UNEXPECTED: the release itself carries a Syrian 2010 GDP per head of US$2,891, with no source given. That is inside the band the chapter's fourth chase is about, so the third and fourth cases are connected by a single document, which neither the source manuscript nor the draft knew. FOUR: the figure entered circulation before the report existed. The release is dated 1 December 2011 and describes a FORTHCOMING report which will be released later this month. It is quoting a blog post by co-author Sarah Freitas on the Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development website, titled After Years of Leakages, Syrian Capital Flight Likely Intensifying. So the chain is blog post, then press release, then the world, three weeks ahead of the study. CHARACTERISATION: the release says Syria lost US$23.6 billion to corruption, crime and tax evasion; the quoted blog says from corruption, trade mispricing, bribery, and other illicit activity. Trade mispricing is named in the blog quotation and not in the headline framing. Contact given as Clark Gascoigne CLEAN CAPTURE OBTAINED 12 AUGUST 2026, BEFORE THE D-047 REDRAFT, AND IT SUPERSEDES THE CLIPPED ONE. The held capture was a web print clipped at the right margin whose clipped stretch ran through and past the block quotation, disclosed as such in the prose from v12 and never retried, which the 11 August diff review recorded as a blocker: a defective capture of a 2011 release on a live publisher's site is a retrieval task, not a sentence. Two routes: a constructed address returned HTTP 404, and the live address, which differs from it by two words, returned the release complete. WHAT THE CLEAN CAPTURE SETTLES. The absence of the conservative estimate is now read off a whole document: searched for conservative, normalized, normalised, high-end, 15.3 and 15,288, and none occurs. AND IT CARRIES MATERIAL THE CLIPPED CAPTURE LOST: the block quotation's third paragraph reads 'Countries like the United States can make it more difficult for corrupt public officials like al-Asad to smuggle stolen assets out of their countries by eliminating anonymous corporations and strengthening anti-money laundering laws.' The blog post names an individual; the study names no Syrian and reaches no Syrian finding. CLEAN CAPTURE ARCHIVED 12 August 2026 at research/GFI press release Syria Lost US23.6 Billion 1 December 2011 CLEAN CAPTURE 12 August 2026.html, 79,868 bytes, fetched from https://gfintegrity.org/press-release/syria-lost-us23-6-billion-illicit-financial-outflows-2000-2009-says-forthcoming-gfi-report/ . THIS ROW PREVIOUSLY POINTED ONLY AT THE CLIPPED PDF, which is clipped at the right margin exactly at the paragraph the chapter quotes, and in which the string al-Asad does not occur at all. The figures pass recorded that as a MAJOR: a quotation the chapter makes load-bearing had no held document behind it. It now has one. VERIFIED ON THE CLEAN CAPTURE, 12 August 2026: al-Asad occurs once, 2,891 once, 1,048 once, 23.6 five times; and 15,288, 15.3, conservative, normaliz, normalis and high-end all occur ZERO times, so the absence of the conservative estimate is read off a whole document. THE WORLD BANK HYPERLINK IS PRESENT IN THE RELEASE MARKUP TOO, on the phrase 'a per capita GDP', pointing at data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD.