Monthly Archives: March 2018

Netanyahu’s Attempts to Undermine Police Recommendations May Be Dangerous for Israel

Posted on by
3

Israeli police have been investigating multiple corruption allegations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for over a year. First, Netanyahu allegedly accepted extravagant gifts—such as expensive cigars, Champagne, and jewelry—from wealthy businessman Arnon Milchan in exchange for helping him secure a U.S. visa. Netanyahu is separately accused of striking a deal with the publisher of the newspaper Yediot Ahronoth, in which Netanyahu would push legislation that would curb competition from a rival paper, and in return Yediot Ahronoth would provide more favorable coverage of Netanyahu’s administration.

Recently, the Israeli police issued a recommendation that Netanyahu be charged with bribery, fraud, and a breach of trust in the two corruption cases. Perhaps anticipating this potential outcome, last December Netanyahu downplayed the significance of police recommendations, asserting that the “vast majority of police recommendations end in nothing.” Also last December, the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) passed, at the urging of Netanyahu’s supporters, a new Police Recommendations Law placing further restrictions on police recommendations for indictments. Though public pressure ultimately led to modifications so that the bill would not apply to the current investigations, it was also seen as prompted in large part by concerns about the possibility, now realized, that the police would recommend charges against the Prime Minister.

What, exactly, is so significant about the police recommendation in Israeli investigations into corruption and other matters? To get a better sense of what’s going on, it’s useful to take a step back and consider what Israel’s police recommendations are and whether they serve a useful function.

Continue reading →

Anticorruption Bibliography–March 2018 Update

Posted on by
Reply

An updated version of my anticorruption bibliography is available from my faculty webpage. A direct link to the pdf of the full bibliography is here, and a list of the new sources added in this update is here. As always, I welcome suggestions for other sources that are not yet included, including any papers GAB readers have written.

Rooting Out Malaysia’s Deep-Seated Corruption Requires Fundamental Political Reform

Posted on by
Reply

In a previous post, I wrote that to rebuild credibility and clean house in the wake of the 1MDB scandal, Malaysia needs to give the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission independent prosecutorial power. Even that much-needed reform, however, would leave Malaysia with a long way to go in its anticorruption efforts. The biggest obstacle to real improvement in Malaysia’s fight against corruption is not technical, but political: the chokehold that a single party—the National Front (Barisan Nasional or “BN”)—has on Malaysian politics.

The BN is a coalition party dominated by the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), and it has been in power since the 1970s. In a country with deep ethnic divisions, the party has managed to cling to power by perpetuating a far-reaching system of preferential treatment for the ethnic Malay majority. As a result, UMNO has a lock on the Malay vote – and therefore on general elections. Furthermore, Malay-owned firms get first priority for the award of government contracts, which perpetuates a culture of cronyism. UMNO leadership has a symbiotic relationship with an elite class of Malay businesspeople. On top of all this, districts in Malaysia are gerrymandered to give more weight to rural Malay areas. In the most recent general election, in 2013, the opposition party won the popular vote but did not win enough parliamentary seats to take power.

A party with a near-guaranteed place at the top has little incentive to clean up corruption. As visibly corrupt as UMNO may be, Malay voters are forced to weigh punishing UNMO corruption against preserving their privileges in every sector of life, from education to home-buying to business. Until there are significant changes in Malaysia’s political structure, anticorruption efforts are likely to be piecemeal and ultimately insignificant. A more structural change is required if there is to be any hope for rooting out corruption in Malaysia.

Continue reading →

Corruption in the Trump Administration: A Discussion on “The Scholars’ Circle”

Posted on by
1

As readers of this blog are well aware, we’ve had quite a bit of discussion here regarding concerns about corruption and conflicts of interest in the Trump Administration (including our regularly-updated page that tracks credible allegations of such corruption and conflicts). I recently had the opportunity to participate in a discussion of these issues on “The Scholars’ Circle,” a radio program hosted by Maria Armoudian (and to which I’ve had the opportunity to contribute once before). I was joined for the panel by Professor Richard Gordon, an expert in money laundering who directs the Case Western Financial Integrity Institute. A recording of the program can be found here. Some highlights of the discussion:

  • We started with an overview of the various kinds of allegations of corruption and conflicts of interest in the Trump Administration—basically, an oral summary of some of the highlights of our Trump Corruption Tracker (from about 1:30 to about 7:55 on the recording of the broadcast).
  • Professor Gordon followed up on this by providing an overview of money laundering allegations against Trump associates and Trump businesses, principally before the election, which prompted some back-and-forth discussion of these issues (7:56-17:30).
  • We then proceeded to discuss what Ms. Armoudian called the “So What?” question: Why these issues are important, and what their larger adverse consequences might be (17:30-22:32).
  • This was followed by some consideration of why the allegations of corruption and associated misbehavior don’t appear to bother President Trump’s supporters, and what, if anything, might prompt them to care more about these issues (22:33-28:56).
  • Ms. Armoundian then posed the provocative question of whether the Trump administration might portend the a more general spread of the “culture of corruption” throughout American politics and society, along with the erosion of rule-of-law norms and values—making U.S. politics resemble more closely what we’ve seen in other countries, such as Kenya, Brazil, South Africa, Italy, etc. (29:54-42:23).
  • The discussion then turned to the broader question of the problems of American democracy and political institutions that allowed Trump to win both the nomination and the general election, and whether Trump an aberration or sign of things to come (42:24-49:14).
  • Ms. Armoudian concluded the conversation by asking about what, if anything can be done to preserve the traditional norms and values of American political institutions and to prevent a slide into a culture of corruption in the United States. This part of the conversation went well beyond corruption, and touched on the importance of making sure, more generally, that political institutions work, and are perceived as working, as well as trying to cultivate a health political culture (49:15-56:28).

I hope the discussion may be of interest to some of our readers out there.

Conference on Human Rights and Asset Recovery

Posted on by
Reply

The Open Society Foundations hosts a conference this Friday, March 16, at its Washington office on the human rights issues raised when stolen assets are returned.  During the morning session new strategies for addressing corruption before UN treaty bodies and the complementarity of international laws on human rights and criminal justice governing asset recovery will be discussed.  In the afternoon, speakers will examine the role of asset-holding states and international organizations in ensuring accountability in asset recovery and return and civil society’s role. Previously unpublicized information on the return of stolen assets to Kazakhstan will be reviewed for the lessons it offers.

Click here for more on the agenda and a list of speakers.  Those wishing to attend should RSVP to Joshua Russell.

Maybe Half-Measures Aren’t Half Bad: Reflecting on Ghana’s Anticorruption Progress

Posted on by
1

Ghana, like many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, has long struggled with serious public corruption problems. Yet there have recently been encouraging signs of progress. Back in 2009, during the administration of then-President John Atta Mills, Ghana began formulating an ambitious, long-term National Anti-Corruption Action Plan (NACAP) with 120 goals. After President Mills’ death, work on the plan continued under President John Mahama; although Parliamentary approval was not required, President Mills nonetheless submitted the final version of the plan to Parliament, which ultimately approved the plan in 2014. Commitment to the plan appears as strong as ever despite a change of party with the ascension of President Nana Akufo-Addo in January 2017.

Of course, lots of countries develop ambitious-sounding national anticorruption strategies, and in many cases these strategies don’t achieve much. (More cynical critics argue that these plans are often not intended to actually do anything other than to create the appearance that the problem is being taken seriously.) But according to a report released last fall by Princeton University’s Institute for Successful Societies, there are encouraging signs that Ghana’s anticorruption plan is working, despite some significant setbacks and limitations. Because those of us who work on anticorruption, especially in challenging environments, are so starved for good news and anxious for lessons learned, it’s worth considering some of the factors that seem to have contributed to the relative success of Ghana’s recent efforts. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Afghanistan’s Radical–and So-Far-Surprisingly Successful–Public Procurement Reforms

Posted on by
4

Today’s guest post is co-authored by frequent GAB guest contributor Mark Pyman, Senior Fellow at the London Institute for Statecraft and former Commissioner of the Afghanistan Joint Independent Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee, together with Sohail Kaakar of the Afghanistan National Procurement Authority.

Afghanistan may be one of the most corrupt countries in the world, but it is also where some of the world’s most innovative anticorruption solutions are being implemented. Case in point: Afghanistan’s reforms to its public procurement system.

In Afghanistan, government procurement accounts for 19% of GDP and almost 50% of the national budget. However, procurement corruption has long been endemic, with many figures taking large cuts from almost every contract, and many contracts being little more than money-extraction schemes. But in 2015—at a critical juncture, when Afghanistan’s government was faced with unprecedented public pressure due to insecurity, recession, withdrawal of international troops—the government adopted significant reforms to its procurement system in order to curb corruption and improve government performance. (The immediate catalyst for the reform was a particularly corrupt military fuel contract, but the reforms go well beyond addressing this one incident.)

After a brief review of alternatives, the Afghan government decided on a radical reform based on a single regulatory body and a centralized procurement system. Continue reading →

Two Essential Volumes on Corruption

Posted on by
2

The study of corruption and what to do about it is no longer an academic or policy-studies backwater.  Matthew’s bibliography of corruption-related publications now lists over 6,000 books, articles, and reports and, as his regular updates show (thank you Matthew), the list continues to grow at the rate of some 50 plus per month.  That is the good news.  It is also of the course the bad news.  Few practitioners, and I suspect even academics, can claim to have absorbed the learning in the 6,000 current documents let alone keep up with the outpouring of new works.

For those who can’t , I recommend two recent books: Dan Hough’s Analysing Corruption and Alina Mungui-Pippidi and Michael Johnston’s Transitions to Good Governance: Creating Virtuous Circles of Anti-Corruption.  Both do an excellent job of synthesizing and extending recent scholarship on corruption issues, and both do so in a sophisticated but accessible manner.  Both have the added virtue of being available in reasonably priced paperback editions. Continue reading →

The New Corruption Perceptions Index Identifies Countries with Statistically Significant Changes in Perceived Corruption–Should We Credit the Results?

Posted on by
3

As most readers of this blog are likely aware, last month Transparency International (TI) released the 2017 edition of its important and influential Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). As usual, the publication of the CPI triggered a fair bit of media coverage, much of it focused on how various countries ranked, and how individual country scores had changed from one year to the next (see, for example, here, here, here, and here).

There’s a lot to say about the most recent CPI—I may devote a post at some point to TI’s interesting decision to focus the press release accompanying the publication of the 2017 CPI less on the index itself than on the connection between (perceived) corruption and a lack of adequate freedom and protections for the media and civil society. But in this preliminary post, I want to take up an issue that regular GAB readers will know has been something of a fixation of mine in past years: the emphasis—in my view mostly misplaced—on how individual country CPI scores have changed from year to year.

In prior posts, I’ve raised a number of related but distinct concerns about the tendency of some commentators—and, more disturbingly, of some policymakers—to attach great significance to whether a country’s CPI score has gone up or down relative to previous years. For one thing, the sources used to construct the CPI for any given country may change from year to year—and adding or dropping an idiosyncratic source can have a substantial effect on the aggregate CPI score. For another, even when the underlying sources don’t change, we don’t know whether those sources are on the same implicit scale from year to year. And even if we put these problems to one side, a focus on changes in the final CPI score can sometimes obscure the statistical uncertainty associated with the estimated CPI—these scores can be noisy enough that changes in scores, even those that seem large, may not be statistically meaningful according to the conventional tests. Although TI always calculates statistical confidence intervals, in prior years these intervals have been buried in hard-to-find Excel spreadsheets, and the changes in CPI scores that TI highlights in its annual press releases haven’t always been statistically significant by TI’s own calculations. In an earlier post, I suggested that at the very least, TI should provide an easy-to-find, easy-to-read table assessing which changes in country scores are statistically significant at conventional levels, preferably over a 4-year period (as 1-year changes are both harder to detect if trends are gradual, and less interesting).

Apparently some folks within TI were thinking along similar lines, and I was pleased to see that in the 2017 CPI includes a reasonably prominent link to a spreadsheet showing those countries for which the 2017 CPI score showed a “statistically significant difference” from that country’s CPI score in each of five comparison years (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016).

I’ve still got some criticisms and concerns, which—in the spirit of constructive engagement—I’ll turn to in just a moment. But before getting to that, let me pause to note my admiration for TI as an organization, and in this case its research department in particular, for constantly working to improve both the CPI itself and how it is presented and interpreted. It’s easy for folks like me to criticize—and I’ll continue to do so, in the interests of pushing for further improvements—but it’s much more challenging to absorb the raft of criticisms from so many quarters, sift through them, and invest the necessary time and resources to adapt and adjust from year to year. So, in case any folks at TI are reading this, let me first acknowledge and express my appreciation for how much work (often thankless) goes into the creation and continued improvement of this valuable tool.

Having said that, let me now proceed to raising some comments, questions, and concerns about TI’s claims about countries that appear to have experienced statistically meaningful changes in their CPI scores over the last five years. Continue reading →

How Can an Anticorruption Agency Repair Its Reputation After a Scandal? Lessons from Ghana

Posted on by
4

Corruption-plagued countries often create independent anticorruption agencies (ACAs) to ensure the integrity of other institutions. But sometimes ACAs get caught up in their own scandals—scandals that can undermine their credibility and hard-won public trust. ACAs may be particularly at risk because of the threat they pose to powerful elites, who will always be on the lookout for ways to undercut ACAs. Of course, ACAs should be attuned to these risks and to put measures in place to minimize them. But no preventative system is perfect. What to do when it fails? When an ACA’s reputation has been besmirched by an internal corruption scandal, what can the agency do to restore public trust?

Ghana’s experience may offer some lessons. In 2008, Ghana established the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), which is responsible for anticorruption enforcement, among other things. CHRAJ has done much good work, from conducting investigations of corruption allegations to producing conflict-of-interest guidelines and a code of conduct. But in 2011, the CHRAJ was rocked by an internal scandal when it was revealed that Lauretta Lamptey, then chief of the CHRAJ, had misappropriated public funds to renovate her official residence, to pay hotel bills, and to upgrade her air tickets. The scandal “dented the image of the CHRAJ both nationally and internationally” and jeopardized public trust in the CHRAJ and the willingness of Ghanaian citizens to report corruption cases to the commission.

Damage control was absolutely crucial—and seems to have been largely successful. According to the US State Department’s Ghana 2016 Human Rights Report, public confidence in the CHRAJ is again high. The CHRAJ’s relative success in restoring credibility after its internal corruption scandal suggests a few guidelines for how an ACA can respond effectively in this sort of situation:

Continue reading →