Foglamp founder Nathaniel Heller; credit: New York Times

Foglamp’s unique approach to working with investors was recently profiled in The New York Times as, “A new type of company intended to put social goals ahead of making profits…”

Global Integrity, is likely to spin off a project called Foglamp, which it started, into a flexible-purpose company. Foglamp has a worldwide network of 1,200 people that provide research, for example, on a country’s political stability. Hedge funds, institutional investors and global companies pay market rates for the information.

Nathaniel Heller, Global Integrity’s managing director, said that on at least two occasions recently, it had to turn away venture capitalists wanting to invest in Foglamp. “As a nonprofit, we have no equity to offer them,” Mr. Heller said.

That means, he said, that Foglamp can only grow “arithmetically, not geometrically.” He added, “As a nonprofit, we don’t have extra cash sitting around that would allow us to hire five more employees for Foglamp.”

Read the full story here.

The Transneft controversy has only heightened interest in Mr. Navalny’s blog. He has since branched out from shareholder activism, creating RosPil.info, a new Web site about corruption in the government procurement process. It posts documents about state tenders and asks for public input on matters like the fairness of the prices or the deadlines.

Africa had a bad reputation in business circles. Of course some African countries have issues but the vast numbers of countries are actually okay. So the perception of Africa is much worse than the reality. And whenever there is gap between perception and reality there’s a fantastic business opportunity.

Full story is here.

A new joint-donor study, led by the Technical Advisory Services and commissioned by the Embassy of Denmark, the World Bank, and the Embassy of Sweden in Vietnam “Recognizing and Reducing Corruption Risks in Land Management in Vietnam” systematically examines the process of obtaining a land-use rights certificate and the processes associated with land acquisition and allocation. The study identifies the policies that make corruption so profitable, and the challenges that make it so difficult to stop.

Although a dense report, this is a must-read for real estate investors and developers exploring opportunities in Vietnam.  Click here for the full report.

“Private equity firms are 10 years ahead of hedge funds in understanding the importance of vetting management teams in onsite due diligence”…But, unlike hedge funds, when it comes to compliance, “most firms are winging it.”

You can access the full interview here.

Africa, in fact, is now one of the world’s fastest-growing economic regions. Between 2000 and 2008, the continent’s collective GDP grew at 4.9 percent per year — twice as fast as in the preceding two decades. By 2008, that put Africa’s economic output at $1.6 trillion, roughly on par with Russia and Brazil. Africa was one of only two regions — Asia being the other — where GDP rose during 2009′s global recession. And revenues from natural resources, the old foundation of Africa’s economy, directly accounted for just 24 percent of growth during the last decade; the rest came from other booming sectors, such as finance, retail, agriculture, and telecommunications. Not every country in Africa is resource rich, yet GDP growth accelerated almost everywhere.

Nearly 30 years in office, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak has become a strong proponent of a market economy. Only vestiges remain of the state socialism that for decades defined Egypt.  Enterprises like banks that were once state-owned are now firmly in private hands. Foreign investment, construction and tourism are growing and Egypt’s stock exchange, said to be the oldest in the Middle East, is thriving.  But Egypt’s economy has some unusual elements, at least when looking at them with a Western eye.

You can access the full story here.

You can listen to the conference call by clicking on this link, and the slides from the presentation, by Foglamp Managing Director Nathaniel Heller, can be requested from our colleague Kate Horn (kate.horn@foglamp.org; (914) 682-4127).

Our favorite section:

In general, frontier markets are defined as the ‘next’ emerging markets. The economies are more domestic-oriented with a limited number of publicly listed companies; hence, frontier market investments tend to be primarily limited to private equity. A frequent concern quoted by investors is about the quality of the company management. Frontier market investing often requires additional time and due diligence to assess the quality of the management team including more frequent on site visits to evaluate the business effectively. That said, whether in Nigeria, Kenya or Vietnam, we have found that more and more companies are led by a management team that has been educated in the West at academic institutions like a Harvard or London School of Economics.

Read Mobius’ full analysis here.

When it comes to investing, perhaps the most direct impact of the Games debacle will be on the long-term investors that India so badly needs to build infrastructure.

It aspires to more than triple the annual foreign direct investment to $100 billion by 2017. Having seen how execution of such projects gets snared in India’s politics and bureaucracy, investors might find it difficult to commit substantial money.

Click here for the full article.