More than half of the businesses in Tanzania and Kenya still suffer heavy losses from corruption, bribery and financial embezzlement, a global report has revealed.

Sixty-eight percent of the surveyed companies operating in these two countries were vulnerable to economic crimes and they combined to lose 250 million US dollars to fraud in the past two years, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, a reputable audit firm.

The figure could have been much higher as most cases went unreported or could not be immediately quantified, PricewaterhouseCoopers said in its Global Economic Crime Survey for 2005 that was available here on Friday.

The quantified losses, however, have already gone up compared with the results in the PricewaterhouseCoopers' 2002 survey of Tanzania and Kenya that combined to lose 206 million dollars to economic crimes through 189 companies.

Companies participating in the survey in Tanzania and Kenya each reported an average of 11 incidences of economic fraud between May and September this year, exceeding the global average of eight incidences among 3,634 companies in 34 countries.

The incidences of economic fraud in Tanzania and Kenya are the highest among African countries.

The PricewaterhouseCoopers' annual report warned that the rising economic crimes among African countries had posed a threat to their growing economies that could starve from lack of investment capital.

"In Africa, therefore, there is an urgent need for companies and governments to tighten controls and introduce other fraud detection procedures," proposed Jack Ward, PricewaterhouseCoopers investigation leader in sub-Saharan Africa.

The PricewaterhouseCoopers annual report identified the most common forms of fraud as insider trading, counterfeiting, corruption, bribery, financial misrepresentation, falsifying records, asset misappropriation and money laundering.

The report also pointed out that highly learned and motivated executives, aged between 31 and 40, tended to be the culprits of these economic crimes as 92 percent of these executives had committed the offenses twice as much as their lowly-ranked colleagues.

Some affected companies were found by the survey not to have reported fraud or pressed charges, in order to escape negative publicity, high litigation costs and little chance of recovering the stolen assets.

Source: Xinhua