(Reuters) - The World Bank's top anti-corruption official on Monday called for a strengthened global alliance to fight corruption to ensure more wrongdoers are prosecuted.

More than 250 corruption fighters, including attorney generals and heads of corruption agencies from 134 countries, gather at the World Bank from Tuesday for a high-level meeting of the Corruption Hunters Alliance on how to advance the battle against graft.

In an interview, Leonard McCarthy, the World Bank's vice president for integrity, told Reuters he hoped the meeting would agree to a global mechanism to track major corruption cases to ensure more firms and individuals involved in fraud or corruption are held accountable.

This could be done by sharing more information, conducting parallel investigations, and trying to get countries to adopt similar anti-corruption practices.

"I would like to have a tracking mechanism in place for all major corruption cases, including the ones that the World Bank refers to countries," said McCarthy.

"It's not there in a consolidated way," added the former head of South Africa's Scorpions crime-fighting unit, which scored successes against organized crime.

The World Bank has banned more than 100 firms and individuals for fraud and corruption and barred them from bidding for contracts financed with the bank's money.

The most prolific of these cases was against German industrial conglomerate Siemens in July last year for bribery. The World Bank blacklisted Siemens from World Bank-financed development projects for two years and Siemens agreed to pay $100 million over 15 years to support global efforts to fight fraud and corruption.

Siemens ended one of the biggest corporate corruption investigations in history when it agreed last year to pay $1.6 billion to settle probes by U.S. and German authorities into bribes it paid for years to win contracts.

McCarthy said the World Bank meeting will explore what should be done with money from settlements involving corruption by multinational firms. He called for the establishment of an international fund to decide how the money should be allocated.

"I personally like the idea of an anti-corruption fund where one could have a fund that was administered by an eminent panel and then decide what are the worthy causes," he said. "It's a logical next step," McCarthy added.

The meeting will include speakers such as World Bank President Robert Zoellick, U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, Senate judiciary committee chairman, and Luis Ocampo, head of the International Criminal Court.

McCarthy said the past several years has seen major gains in tackling corruption both by governments and institutions like the World Bank but more was needed.

The global financial crisis had highlighted the problem of corruption in developed countries and the high attendance at the World Bank meeting underscored the increased corruption concerns, McCarthy added.

uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE6B603S20101207In a major step in April, the World Bank and other development banks stepped up efforts to root out the corrupt use of aid funding agreeing that companies and individuals blacklisted at one institution would be unwelcome at all.

"What we're trying to do is bring everyone together to say, look, we've had an interesting and mixed decade behind us and lets make sure this decade is better," he added.

Dec. 7, 2010