Guest Post: Towards Truly Global Anticorruption Enforcement

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GAB welcomes this Guest Post by Noam Kozlov, an honors graduate of Hebrew University with an undergraduate degree in Economics and Philosophy and an LL.B. A clerk for Israeli Supreme Court Justice Yosef Elron during the 2024/2025 term, he is now pursuing an LL.M. at the Harvard Law School.

For decades, the United States has spearheaded the global fight against transnational corruption. Its Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the first statute to outlaw foreign bribery, led directly to the 1997 OECD Anti-Bribery Convention which requires all wealthy nations to outlaw foreign bribery. The US has also been the leader in prosecuting foreign bribery cases, bringing more than the rest of the world combined.

The Trump administration’s February 2025 pause in FCPA enforcement, and subsequent new policy narrowing its scope, have created a crisis in the enforcement of this fundamental global anticorruption norm.  What nation has the reach and the resources to take over from the US?

At the same time, there could be a bright edge to the shadow cast by the US retreat. The crisis could force the international community to move away from reliance on a single dominant country and toward a more equitable model of enforcement, one based on shared responsibility through prioritizing the sharing of proceeds and empowering institutions in nations where bribes were paid; an approach that would advance the restitutive objectives of anticorruption enforcement more effectively than the US-centric model ever could.

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Guest Post: Public Debt Confidentiality — Separating Fact from Fiction

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In this guest post, Erin Houlihan, Senior Program Director with the National Democratic Institute, reviews the relationship between confidentiality clauses and hidden debt, and highlights insights and recommendations from the publication. It is drawn from a new brief,developed by Richard Christeland co-published by NDI, OGP and TI, examining the problem of secrecy clauses in sovereign debt agreements and debunking the most common fictions used by lenders and borrowers to justify their use.

The UNCTAD Secretariat calls the current global debt crisis “one the biggest threats to global peace and security and financial stability” facing the world today. By 2030, global public debt is predicted to reach 100 percent of GDP. Unfortunately, the situation is probably worse than the data indicate. 

The problem of hidden debt – meaning debt hidden from both a nation’s citizens and its creditors – is a consistent and “remarkably pervasive” feature of the world’s sovereign debt crisis and one invariably the result of corruption. It is the citizens of borrowing states – mainly Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) – who pay the price when the debt is discovered: increased taxes and fewer public services as governments slash social spending on health, education and other public goods to cover borrowing costs. 

In Mozambique, for instance, the revelation of over USD 2bn in hidden debt prompted the IMF to withdraw aid in 2016, triggering a financial crisis, sovereign debt default, and currency collapse. More recently, a 2024 audit in Senegal revealed billions of dollars in hidden debt from the previous government, throwing the country’s governance credibility and financial future into disarray. 

Why is hidden debt so pervasive and what contributes to non-disclosure?

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Did Australia Just Set a Record for the Lowest Fine in a Foreign Bribery Case?

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Sydney Morning Herald correspondent Nick McKenzie reports that David Savage, former CEO of the Australian infrastructure giant Leighton Holdings, pled guilty January 30 to covering up the payment of $45 million to corrupt Iraqi politicians (here).

The fine: AUD $1000. About $700 in U.S. dollars.

The possibly record setting fine didn’t escape Australian anticorruption activists’ notice. McKenzie quotes Clancy Moore of Transparency International:

This minuscule fine for a huge multimillion dollar bribery scandal is embarrassing and sends the wrong message to Australian businesses working in high-risk industries like infrastructure and mining,”

The story is behind a paywall. For those without an SMH subscription some especially damning facts include —

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Independent Expert Report on Honduras Dam Links Human Rights Violations and Systemic Corruption

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Naomi Roht-Arriaza, Distinguished Professor of Law (emeritus), University of California Law, San Francisco, and author of what this writer called an indispensable guide to combatting corruption, contributes the following post. As with her book, it shows the often close link between corruption and human rights violations.

On the night of March 2, 2016, armed men broke into Berta Cáceres’ home, shot her dead, and wounded her house guest.  Cáceres was well known in Honduras and globally for her opposition to a proposed hydroelectric project damming the Gualcarque river, sacred to her Lenca indigenous people.  The triggermen and the project president were eventually convicted of the murder, but not the masterminds and financial backers, thought to include military officers and powerful families.  After long delay, the fraud behind the dam project, known as Agua Zarca, did finally go to trial, and some (but not all) of those responsible were convicted of fraud, falsification of documents and abuse of authority. 

After years of insisting on a full accounting, victims’ groups working with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights convinced the Honduran government to ask for technical assistance in the form of an expert committee to look at the interplay of corruption, rights violations and corporate irresponsibility surrounding the dam and the murder.  That expert committee has now issued its report (in Spanish only, with English Executive Summary here).

The investigation and report break new ground. 

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FCPA Enforcement Data 2025

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The graphic is from the 2025 report of the Department of Justice’s Fraud Section. Hard to draw any conclusions about the impact of the Trump Administration’s downgrading FCPA enforcement as the cases largely reflect work begun in Biden Administration and earlier.  Perhaps the fact FCPA cases yielded $122.8 million, far in excess of what it cost to prosecute them, will lead Trump Administration officials to reconsidere cutbacks in FCPA enforcement actions. 

Link to the full report here.

Power, Corruption, and Us: Why Do We Choose the Political Leaders We Do?

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GAB welcomes this post by Greysa Barrientos Núñez, a Costa Rican prosecutor with 27 years’ experience investigating and prosecuting financial and corruption-related crimes. She is a member of Norway’s Corruption Hunters Network.

One of the most uncomfortable, but necessary questions in political life is not what decisions those who govern make, but why is it that they come to govern. Political scientist and academic Brian Klaas argues that the most fundamental questions of a society must be directed at who seeks power, who obtains it, and how power transforms the person who exercises it.

There are several explanations that, far from excluding one another, complement each other. One holds that power corrupts; another, that corrupt people are especially drawn to power and are often better at obtaining it; a third points to society, which tends to hand power to bad leaders for the wrong reasons; a fourth shifts the focus to systems, arguing that poorly designed institutional contexts reward the worst behaviors.

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Why Governance Failures Are the Real Root Cause of Financial Crime

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That’s the title of an insightful article on financial crime just posted on NYU’s Compliance and Enforcement blog.  In it author Arun Maheshwar, Executive Director-Head of Model Risk Control, Legal and Compliance at Morgan Stanley, uses the conclusions of numerous enforcement actions across multiple American and foreign jurisdictions to explain why so many organizations private and public are failing to curb employees’ fraud and corruption.

The article is also one more reason why Compliance and Enforcement, sponsored by NYU Law’s Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement, is essential reading for corruption fighters.

To whet GAB readers appetite to click on this link to Maheshwar’s post, excerpts appear below.

“Financial institutions have invested billions of dollars in advanced compliance technology. . . . Yet despite this unprecedented investment, enforcement actions continue to rise in both frequency and severity. . . .

“Across the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union, regulatory findings repeatedly identify the same root causes: unclear accountability, weak escalation, ineffective oversight, fragmented ownership, superficial risk assessments, misaligned incentives, and leadership cultures that treat compliance as a regulatory obligation rather than a core control function. . . .

“Financial crime is a leadership problem. It reflects the values an institution prioritizes, the trade-offs management is willing to make, the incentives that drive behavior, and the accountability structures that shape decision-making.”

January 14 Webinar on the Future of the OECD Antibribery Convention

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Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf moderates a webinar this Wednesday, January 14, 3:30 pm CET, 9:30 EST, with three former Chairs of the OECD Working Group on Bribery.

Parties to the Convention commit to criminalize the bribery of foreign officials and to prosecute those subject to their law regardless of “national economic interest … or the identity of the natural or legal persons involved.” What makes the Convention so critical in the fight against global corruption is their global economic clout. Between them they account for 80% -90% of international trade and investment.  

As with any international agreement, enforcement depends on peer pressure. With the Convention that falls to its Working Group, made up of representatives from its 46 parties with an expert on international antibribery law chairing (here).

The U.S. retreat from enforcement of the FCPA (here) and the Italian judiciary’s dismissal of cases against Italian companies (here) now present the Working Group with its greatest challenge since the Convention came into force. 

What can the Group do to bring the U.S. and Italy into line?  What happens if the U.S. and Italy get away with ignoring their Convention obligations? Will other countries continue to pursue foreign bribery cases? Especially cases that might disadvantage their nationals?

Former Working Group chairs Mark Pieth, Drago Koss, and Danielle Goudriaan will offer their views on the Convention’s future and take questions from participants. Click here to register.

Cour de Comptes’ Evaluation of French Anticorruption Policy

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One of brightest spots in the global fight against corruption has been the French turnaround. Once a laggard among developed nations in enforcing anticorruption laws, as former French Finance Minister Michel Sapin and Valentina Lana, Sciences Po lecturer told GAB readers in 2022 (here), over the past decade thanks to both domestic and international pressure numerous reforms have been approved. They include new laws increasing penalties for bribery and imposing stiff sanctions on companies without an anticorruption compliance program and the creation of an anticorruption agency.

The French Cour de comptes, the national audit agency, recently assessed the country’s progress in curbing corruption and what more needs to be done (report here, summary here).  Not surprisingly, at least to GAB readers, the report emphasized the challenge of measuring corruption.

Thanks to Sophie Lemaître, host of the 1st podcast in French on corruption & tax evasion, for flagging the assessment on her LinkedIn page.

Highlights of the report:

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New York Conference Recommendations on the Future of Corruption Measurement

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The central issue in the fight against corruption is how to measure success. Did changes in the way pharmaceuticals are procured and distributed reduce “leakage.” Did strengthening the anticorruption agency and creating fast track corruption courts reduce bribery?

How to assay these reforms were some of the many questions participants debated at a three-day conference on measuring corruption at the UN’s New York headquarters in early December.

The measurement issue starts with the most basic question: what is corruption. Are all gifts to a public official corrupt? Or just those over say $50? There is the conceptual issue: All other things equal, is corruption greater when two officials each take a $50 bribe or one a $100 bribe? Then there are the practical issues, starting with how to measure conduct like bribery and embezzlement that cannot be directly observed and that the participants go to great lengths to hide (here).

Organized by the UNDP, the International Anticorruption Academy, UNODC, the OECD, and the World Bank, the conference did not produce the definitive guide to corruption measurement. Nor is such a guide even possible, given the definitional, conceptual, and practical issues corruption measurement poses.

What the conference did achieve was more important.

Participants from governments and NGOs from rich and poor countries alike agreed that the impossibility of an all-encompassing measurement tool must not be taken as a counsel of despair. There are many ways progress in the fight against corruption can be measured and much that national governments with input from academics and civil society can do to develop ever better measures of that progress.  The statement issued by this Second Global Conference on Harnessing Data to Improve Corruption Measurement along with the recommendations for advancing the measurement agenda is here.