Today’s guest post is from Jodi Vittori, Professor of Practice at Georgetown University:

This past January, I authored a report, co-sponsored by the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and the National Democratic Institute, entitled “Committing to Combat Kleptocracy: A Guide for Open Government Partnership Members.” The report explains how various kleptocrats and their “enablers” move illicit assets from the country where they were stolen to the locations where they will be stored and enjoyed. The report also discusses how kleptocracy undermines not only the countries where the assets were stolen, but also the transit or destination points for kleptocratic money, people, and other resources.  While it might seem like an infusion of money, assets, and rich people into a given country might be a benefit for that country (putting aside the moral issues), it turns out that these inflows have real drawbacks for the host state, contributing to governance backsliding, facilitating real estate manipulation and industrial asset stripping, exacerbating migration challenges, and undermining national security. The role of Russia’s kleptocracy in election interference in the West, as well as the corruption associated with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, have helped put the role kleptocratic inflows play in receiving states in the spotlight.

The OGP’s open government principles—to which all OGP member governments commit—are a set of norms that, if honored and implemented, will help countries fight back against inflows of kleptocratic assets. At the most basic level, the OGP stresses the importance of making relevant, usable, and timely information on governments available to citizens and civil society to hold their governments accountable. This helps ensure that public resources are managed transparently, fairly, and equitably. The report develops this further by outlining a series of model OGP commitments for consideration by governments and citizen activists, including the following:

• Among the most important proposed reforms is beneficial ownership transparency—ideally through public registries—not only for companies, but also for trusts, foundations, charities, and other financial instruments where anonymity is abused by kleptocrats.
• Another set of commitments involves requiring increased anti-money laundering obligations on enablers of corruption and kleptocracy such as accountants, lawyers, and luxury goods dealers.
• Countries should also commit to providing more resources to asset recovery and engaging in a victim-centered approach to asset returns.
• Another model commitment, which is less prominent in the current anticorruption agenda, is strengthening foreign investment screening. For instance, the UK, US and EU countries might consider expanding the legal mandate for investment screening beyond a narrow definition of national security to also screen foreign investments that are the product of kleptocracy. In the case of the US, this could involve expanding the mandate of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Strengthened investment screening would entail creating more coordination between trade and/or foreign ministries and ministries of justice or law enforcement.
• Additionally, because many kleptocrats want to live openly and be perceived as erudite, cosmopolitan reformers rather than brutish, thieving thugs, greater checks can be placed on academic institutions, public relations firms, and other organizations targeted for reputation laundering to conduct due diligence checks of their clients and file suspicious activity reports as required.

Of course, specific reforms will need to be tailored to the particular situation of each country, and the report is meant not as a rigid set of best practices, but rather as a guide that can help citizens and civil society groups work with reform-minded governments to design anti-kleptocracy resilience strategies that can best work in their specific context.