A/HRC/43/45/Add.2 terrorism. 84 It is worth underscoring the country’s high-level political commitment to addressing money-laundering challenges through its national action plan, under which it is addressing a number of issues, including demonstrating increased numbers of investigations and prosecutions, demonstrating further seizure and recovery of assets, monitoring compliance by designated non-financial businesses and professions, and demonstrating cooperation and coordination between authorities to prevent the evasion of sanctions. 78. Base erosion and profit shifting, which the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has defined as planning strategies used by multinational enterprises that exploit gaps and mismatches in tax rules to avoid paying tax,85 is an issue of paramount importance given the size and complexities of multinational businesses, including those involved in the mining sector. 79. While underlining the important step forward taken by Mongolia in joining the Inclusive Framework, the Independent Expert recommends that the State ensure that it has clear and concise laws and regulations that make it illegal to intentionally incorrectly or inaccurately state the price, quantity, quality or other aspect of trade in goods and services in order to move capital or profits to another jurisdiction or to manipulate, evade or avoid any form of taxation, including customs and excise duties. Customs officials should be required to use available databases of information about comparable pricing of world trade in goods to analyse imports and exports and identify transactions that require additional scrutiny.86 80. Of note is the introduction of the “ultimate holder” concept in the legislative framework, which provides that any changes to title ownership should be treated as a commercial transaction, with a 30 per cent corporate income tax rate.87 The adoption of this measure is an additional effort towards a greater transparency and more robust tax mobilization. 81. The Independent Expert is also concerned about the past occurrence of criminal amnesties, including for economic and tax-related offences with a direct impact on a number of judicial cases. For example, in 2015, an amnesty was granted in connection to a significant number of offences: while no money-laundering investigations were dropped under the amnesty, a total of 80 inquiries, investigations or judicial proceedings related to economic crimes were dismissed.88 2. Corruption 82. Mongolia has been a State party to the United Nations Convention against Corruption since 11 January 2006. A national anti-corruption strategy was adopted in early 2017 to reinforce efforts deployed.89 83. While Mongolia climbed from 103rd to 93rd in its ranking on the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index in 2018, many interlocutors expressed their concerns about the vulnerability of public services to corruption and its potential impact on public revenues, development and human rights.90 These concerns unfortunately echo the concluding observations of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights on the 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 See Financial Action Task Force, “Improving global AML/CFT compliance: ongoing process”, 18 October 2019. Available at www.fatf-gafi.org/publications/high-risk-and-other-monitoredjurisdictions/documents/fatf-compliance-october-2019.html. See www.oecd.org/tax/beps/about/. A/HRC/31/61, para. 87 (c). See http://taxsummaries.pwc.com/ID/Mongolia-Corporate-Taxes-on-corporate-income. Asia/Pacific Group on Money-Laundering, Anti-money-laundering and Counter-terrorist Financing Measures: Mongolia – 2017 Mutual Evaluation Report (Sydney, 2017), p. 51. Available at www.fatfgafi.org/media/fatf/documents/reports/mer-fsrb/Mongolia%20MER%202017%20%20published%20version.pdf. See Transparency International, “Mongolia: overview of corruption and anti-corruption”, 8 June 2018. Asia Foundation, 2018 Study of Private Sector Perceptions of Corruption (San Francisco, 2018), p. 53. 15