Monthly Archives: June 2021

Guest Post: The Case for Corruption Truth Commissions

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Today’s guest post is from Blair Glencorse, the Executive Director of the Accountability Lab, a civil society network that promotes accountability, transparency, and open government.

When corruption is deeply entrenched, it is very difficult to dislodge through criminal prosecution and similar law enforcement efforts. In systems that create very strong incentives to behave corruptly—those where powerful social norms favor graft over honesty—one can expect widespread resistance to attempts at stepped-up enforcement of anticorruption rules, given the number of people who might rationally fear being implicated in wrongdoing. Moreover, given the reluctance of participants in systemically corrupt regimes to disclose their illicit conduct and improper relationships, it is very hard to understand how the corrupt systems operate, who the most culpable perpetrators are, and how such systems can be more effectively dismantled.

A promising response to these problems might be drawn from the experience of addressing widespread human rights violations in moments of transition: truth commissions. While it would obviously be very difficult to set up such a commission during normal times, when the opportunity arises—say, after a regime change, or a significant political turnover sparked by popular protests against corruption—a country could set up an independent body—a corruption truth commission—to manage a process by which amnesty would be offered to those who had engaged in unlawful corrupt acts, in exchange for a full and truthful accounting of the corrupt conduct that they had perpetrated or witnessed.

This approach has several practical benefits. It creates a permanent record of the abuse of power, builds an evidence base to go after those perpetrators who either reject the offer of amnesty or are too high-level to be eligible, and can help countries recover ill-gotten assets. By exposing the workings of corrupt networks, corruption truth commissions would also help us better understand how to identify and counter corrupt networks before they can take root.

While the appropriate design of such a body would obviously depend on the specific circumstances of each individual country, five general principles are broadly applicable:

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A Closer Look at Corruption, Hamas, and Violence in the Gaza Strip

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The recent violent clash between Israel and Hamas followed a pattern that has become depressingly familiar since Hamas won control of the Gaza Strip in 2006: Hamas instigates violence towards Israel and its civilians; Israel responds with military strikes targeting Hamas’s weaponry infrastructure, but since Hamas has intentionally embedded itself in Gaza’s civilian population, Israel’s strikes inevitably claim innocent lives. The question whether Israel’s response was proportional or excessive saturates the news and media. Eventually the two sides reach a tentative ceasefire, the violence subsides, and attention turns elsewhere—until the vicious cycle repeats.

Most readers, whatever their views on the underlying moral and legal issues, are likely familiar with this pattern. But what does this have to do with corruption? Quite a bit, actually. 

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Something Is Rotten from the State of Denmark

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In this year’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) rankings, Denmark yet again topped the list (tied with New Zealand) as the world’s cleanest country. But the CPI has well-known limitations—including the fact that it focuses on corruption within countries while excluding how country’s nationals behave abroad. And in this latter context, Denmark performs rather poorly. Danish companies have faced numerous credible allegations of paying bribes worth hundreds of millions of dollars in dozens of countries (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). Several of those countries have been sanctioned by the World Bank and the European Union. Yet Danish companies have largely escaped suffering any consequence within Denmark for their corrupt practices abroad. Of the thirteen major allegations of foreign bribery brought in the last decade by Danish authorities against Danish companies, several closed without adequate investigation, and none resulted in any prosecution. No wonder that Denmark’s last report card on from the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Working Group—released in 2015—found Denmark’s performance in enforcing its laws against foreign bribery to be deeply wanting. Yet six years and many public commitments later, Denmark has done very little (other than publishing a three-page “How to avoid corruption” pamphlet) to address its shortcomings in this area.

So, what’s stopping the “least corrupt” country in the world (at least, according to the CPI) from tackling its foreign bribery problem? If allegations of foreign bribery are widespread and credible, why have Danish companies continued to enjoy effective domestic impunity? There are two ways to answer this question, one of which focuses on the legal deficiencies in Denmark’s criminal code, which make it hard for prosecutors to bring winning cases, and the other of which focuses on the reasons why Denmark hasn’t changed these laws, notwithstanding critical commentaries and advice from organizations like the OECD.

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What the Odebrecht Case Teaches

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The anticorruption community owes the American Economic Association and Nicolás Campos, Eduardo Engel, Ronald D. Fischer, and Alexander Galetovic a debt of gratitude. The AEA for publishing their article “The Ways of Corruption in Infrastructure: Lessons from the Odebrecht Case” and making it available free to non-members (here). The four Chilean scholars for showing how much can be learned when a command of the literature on corruption is coupled with a careful, painstaking study of a single case.

In 2016, the Brazilian engineering and construction company Odebrecht admitted in a settlement with American, Brazilian, and Swiss authorities (here) to bribing 600 officials in 12 states either to secure contracts to build roads, powerplants, and other large infrastructure projects or to agree to raise the contract price during construction of the project. Information the authors pieced together from the settlement documents show the company grossed $3.3 billion in profits from paying $788 million in bribes.  These numbers confirm the obvious: the returns from infrastructure corruption are enormous, and significant resources should be devoted to preventing it.

Digging deeper into the massive amount of paper the several prosecutions of Odebrecht and its executives have generated, the authors report other findings that are not so obvious.

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New Podcast Episode, Featuring Robert Barrington

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, I interview Robert Barrington, currently a professor of practice at the University of Sussex’s Centre for the Study of Corruption, who previously served for over a decade as the executive director of Transparency International UK. Over the course of the interview, Professor Barrington and I discuss how is background in the financial sector informed his work as a civil society advocate, the strategies that proved most effective in lobbying for improving anticorruption and corporate transparency laws in the UK (especially the UK Bribery Act, the creation of the “unexplained wealth order” mechanism, and the public registry of companies’ beneficial owners), and the prospects for future progress on fighting corruption in the UK in the post-Brexit world. You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations: KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

Announcement: The Anticorruption Corpus Launch Event

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As I mentioned in a previous post, the anticorruption NGO Global Integrity (GI), in collaboration with the UK’s Anti-Corruption Evidence Research Programme, have created a new resource for anticorruption researchers–an Anticorruption Evidence Library–which is based on the bibliography of anticorruption sources that I started compiling several years back (and for which I announce monthly updates on this blog). Tomorrow (Wednesday, June 23), at 9 am US East Coast Time, Global Integrity will be hosting an online event to mark the launch of the library, and to provide scholars, activists, and other researchers more information about how to use the library to identify and access sources that can contribute to developing a solid, evidence-based approach to assessing and addressing corruption problems. You can find out more information about the event, along with a link to preregister, here. I hope to see many of you there!

The Case Against High-Denomination Bank Notes

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Although the use of cash continues to decline in both the legitimate and illicit economies, lots of criminal transactions, including bribe payments, still use cash—slipped into pockets or envelopes, or carried in briefcases and suitcases. The anonymity, untraceability, and universal acceptance of cash make it useful for many types of criminal activity, including not only corruption, but also drug trafficking, human trafficking, and terrorism. Cash is also indispensable to money laundering, because it both obscures the source of funds and enables money to flow undetected across borders. (As a Europol report observed, “[a]lthough not all use of cash is criminal, all criminals use cash at some stage in the money-laundering process.”) Indeed, as governments and banks increasingly scrutinize electronic transactions, parts of the illicit economy will embrace cash all the more.

Nobody seriously argues for eliminating cash entirely. But there is a simple step that monetary authorities can and should take to make cash-based criminal transactions substantially harder, without substantially impinging on the legitimate cash-based economy: eliminate high-denomination notes.

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A Media Advisor-Client Privilege Would Be Inimical to Anticorruption in Israel

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The ongoing corruption trial of Israel’s Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu (who stepped down as Israel’s Prime Minister in mid-June 2021 after 12 consecutive years of service, replaced by Naftali Bennett), as well as the investigations that took place before it, have triggered a wide variety of legislative reform proposals. Members of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) who oppose Netanyahu have proposed bills that would prevent individuals with sufficiently serious prior criminal convictions from serving as the Prime Minister (which Netanyahu is planning on trying to do again), or bar certain criminal defendants from running for Israel’s Presidency (which some had formerly speculated Netanyahu may do). Knesset members from Netanyahu’s Likud Party, on the other hand, have pushed to bolster protections for criminal suspects and defendants, especially elected officials. For example, Likud members have proposed bills that would prohibit some forms of recording of public servants, or make it more difficult for the prosecution to appeal acquittals.

The fact that the criminal proceeding against Netanyahu has relied in substantial part on the incriminating key testimony of Netanyahu’s former media advisor (who became a “state’s witness” in 2018) is the likely (though not explicit) motivation for another recently proposed bill that would establish a “media advisor-client privilege,” according to which “matters and documents exchanged between a media advisor or a spokesperson and his [or her] client [] and which have a material relation to the services provided” could not be submitted as evidence unless the client waived this privilege. In other words, media advisors or spokespersons would generally be barred from testifying against their clients. The bill’s drafters argue that a media advisor-client privilege is justified for reasons similar to that of an attorney-client privilege—the need for “complete openness” between clients and their media advisors or spokespersons.

The impulse to resist the proposed media advisor-client privilege is understandable, given its seemingly blatant relationship to Netanyahu’s trial and the fact that its protection would be afforded to a very narrow class of powerful and wealthy criminal defendants. However, even though we should sometimes resist the impulse to oppose criminal justice reforms whose proponents have questionable motives, in this case even when considered independently from its problematic context, the proposal for media advisor-client privilege raises at least three strong anticorruption concerns that warrant its rejection:

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Time for the U.K. to Match U.S. Ambitions in the Fight Against Corruption

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GAB is pleased to welcome this guest post by Susannah Fitzgerald, Network Co-Ordinator of the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition, which brings together the UK’s leading anti-corruption organisations to tackle corruption in the UK and the UK’s role in facilitating corruption abroad.

President Biden’s June 3 commitment “to prevent and combat corruption at home and abroad” is welcome news to corruption fighters around the globe. Five years ago, then U.K. Prime Minster David Cameron outlined similar ambitions at the International Anti-Corruption Summit in London. Yet, despite a promising start in the years after the Summit, the U.K. anti-corruption agenda now looks alarmingly close to stalling.

It is time reinvigorate that agenda, and not only for the sake of British citizens. Like the United States, the United Kingdom is an important financial center, and the measures it takes to curb corruption, fight money laundering, and ease the return of stolen assets will benefit populations around the world.

Here is what the UK has done so far do to tackle corruption, why it matters, and what more the Coalition believes it needs to do.

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Guest Post: The Role of Assemblage Theory in Rethinking Anticorruption Reform

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Today’s guest post is from Grant Walton, a Fellow at the Development Policy Centre at Australia National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy, and the Chair of ANU’s Transnational Research Institute on Corruption.

For more than twenty years, international donors have advocated and supported anticorruption reform programs in developing countries. While supporters of these efforts can point to some demonstrable successes (see, for example, here and here), many skeptics have questioned the effectiveness of such interventions. Indeed, the harshest critics echo Barney Warf’s assessment that many anticorruption reforms “amount to little more than hollow rhetoric, the punishment of a few sacrificial lambs, and little substantive change.”

In response to these criticisms, some academics have started to reassess the assumptions that have guided donor-supported anticorruption efforts, including how corruption and the responses to it are conceptualized. One of the most innovative strands of this burgeoning literature draws on a framework called “assemblage theory.”

This framework, devised by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is complex, but to boil it down, assemblage theory attempts to describe the world by focusing on the fluid non-hierarchical relationships that form between humans, ideas, and objects. Assemblages come together at crucial moments (to design a policy for example) and then disperse. Rather than examining the role of different groups or institutions, assemblage theorists focus on the way people, ideas, and objects are connected across time and space, and how these connections help shape events, ideas, and policies.

An increasing number of scholars now draw on assemblage theory to understand the complex world of policymaking, which is rarely a linear process, and involves humans, ideas and objects that stretch across the globe. And, as I highlight in a recent article, anticorruption scholarship in particular has drawn on assemblage theory to reimagine the effectiveness of anticorruption reforms in two ways:

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