It took the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti to expose the rot in the world’s charities. Well-meaning people and their governments donated about $12 billion dollars of emergency aid, virtually none of which reached individual Haitians. The funds that were delivered went mostly to enrich the donor countries’ government agencies, aid agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGO), and the vast majority of the pledged funds were never delivered at all. Some of this disappeared money was embezzled. Two criminal cases in 2015 give a glimpse into the use of NGOs by criminal networks to launder embezzled aid money.
Aid, Mediterranean style
Rafael Blasco, one of Spain’s longest-lived and most indestructible politicians, became the first person to serve time for stealing Haitian reconstruction funds when he began a six-and-a-half-yearprison