Monthly Archives: September 2026

Republican Senator Seeks Investigation into Whether Donald Trump Jr. is Profiting Off Ties to His Father

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Senator John Curtis, a Republican from Utah, wrote the Senate Judiciary Committee September 21 asking it to investigate whether Donald Trump Jr., eldest child of President Donald Trump, has used his relationship with his father “for private financial benefit.”

In the letter (here), he writes that

For years, serious questions have been raised about members of presidential families using their names and proximity to the President to advance private business interests.

In a nod to fairness and bipartisanship, he asks the Committee to investigate Hunter Biden as well, but the bulk of his letter recounts the ways Don Jr. has used the family name to enrich himself. From the payment of a lavish wedding afterparty by a Russian oligarch, to his promotion of family-backed cryptocurrency ventures, the pursuit of international real estate deals, several reported investments in defense contracting.

“These reports raise legitimate questions about foreign access to members of a sitting president’s family and whether such relationships can create actual or perceived expectations of favorable treatment,” he writes. He then asks the Committee to “establish the facts, determine whether existing ethics, disclosure, or anti-corruption laws apply, and identify reforms necessary to prevent the presidency from becoming a vehicle for private enrichment by those closest to it.”

The letter is remarkable for two reasons. It puts the question of Presidential relatives trading on their link to the single most powerful individual in the modern world on the agenda at a time when it is likely to engage the public (and hence lawmakers), and it was written by a Republican. It’s unlikely the Committee will act before November, but, particularly if the Republicans suffer a major defeat in November, an investigation will surely be at the top of agenda in 2027.

IMF Report on Ukraine Asset Declaration System: Wasting enormous resources on low value tasks, spending little on those that matter

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No, that is not what the new IMF report on Ukrainian’s asset declaration system says. International organizations are never that blunt. 

But reading the careful, thorough assessment of Ukraine’s most important anticorruption program it is clear that is what the authors were thinking given what they found. And what they did say comes awfully close:

  • “The effectiveness of Ukraine’s [Asset Declaration System] is undermined by an overly expansive and highly formalistic framework that overburdens the [National Agency on Corruption Prevention], weakens prioritization, and limits the system’s capacity to support meaningful detection and recovery of illicit assets.”
  • “[Its] expansive scope, which is unmatched by other European nations, strains the NACP by forcing it to manage one of the world’s largest database of public officials’ assets with highly limited resources.”
  • “The conversion of NACP findings into final judicial sanctions remains limited. In 2025, the NACP transmitted 369 reasoned conclusions to law enforcement for criminal prosecution. These resulted in 12 guilty verdicts, a marked improvement from zero verdicts in 2021, but a conversion rate that remains low relative to the volume of referrals and reflects the broader systemic delays in the judicial pipeline for high-level corruption cases.”

More lifestyle audits

Comparing what officials declare they own to their house they live in, the car they drive, the vacations they take, and other properties they own and expenses they incur is the most effective way to spot if they are corrupt (here). The NACP has a unit dedicated to conducting such audits, but as the IMF report found, not only does the Lifestyle Management (LSM) group have a small staff, but the audits do not focus on priority areas such as 

“. . . war-related procurement and expenditure, where the convergence of significant public resources and reduced oversight creates acute corruption vulnerabilities.”  

The recommendation to audit the lifestyle of those involved in procuring military supplies and equipment comes at a critical time. Confidential reviews by the State Audit Service and an internal Ministry of Defense auditing department show war profiteering has reached unconscionable levels. Front-line troops are being supplied with worthless ammunition while military contractors are reaping huge profits (here).

Lifestyle audits are the surest, fastest way to weed out those officials corrupting the military procurement process. NACP staff now conducting routine checks of the accuracy of low-level officials’ declarations should be reassigned to the LSM unit and ordered to scrutinize the lifestyle of every single individual involved in military procurement.

Ukraine’s supporters in the international community have long recognized that an asset declaration program is crucial to curbing corruption and made its establishment a condition of continued financial assistance. The IMF report provides a roadmap for making the program effective. The international community should insist the government follow that map with haste.

Corruption Sanctions: What Do Governments Need to Know?

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GAB welcomes back Guest Blogger Anton Moiseienko, Associate Professor of Law at the Australian National University. Professor Moiseienko specializes in financial crime and economic sanctions, with particular expertise in global anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CTF) regulation. He is the author of the 2025 volume Doing Business with Criminals considered an indispensable guide to the global AML/CTF system.

How to harness the promise of corruption sanctions while minimizing their unintended consequences is the issue at the heart of a recent report I wrote for the Basel Institute on Governance, a leading Swiss anti-corruption research center, entitled “Corruption Sanctions: What Governments Need to Know.” In this post, I will offer brief reflections based on its analysis.

The Evolution of Corruption Sanctions

It is useful to start by canvassing the history of corruption sanctions. Targeted sanctions are financial and travel restrictions imposed by governments against individuals or companies outside any judicial process. They emerged in the 1990s as a prominent response to various forms of alleged wrongdoing, including terrorist financing, nuclear proliferation and drug trafficking.

Prior to that, sanctions tended to take the form of comprehensive economic measures against entire countries, such as travel embargoes. By contrast, targeted sanctions enable governments to surgically focus on individuals and companies deemed to be involved in a particular form of malfeasance. Some targeted sanctions programs target affiliates of a rogue government – say Russia, North Korea or Iran – whereas others are “thematic” and therefore address a certain type of wrongdoing regardless of where it takes place in the world.

Corruption sanctions are a form of thematic sanctions. Their evolution began in the U.S. in the early 2000s. In 2004, President George W. Bush signed into law Proclamation 7750 that authorized confidential visa sanctions against corrupt foreign officials and their family members. From 2008 onwards, this sanctions program has been augmented by the sanctions provisions under section 7031(c) of the annual Consolidated Appropriations Acts, which provide for public visa bans. Finally, Congress adopted the Magnitsky Act in 2012 and the Global Magnitsky Act in 2016. Both grant the President the authority to impose financial and travel sanctions against those suspected of corruption and human rights abuse.

Other jurisdictions soon followed suit, including Canada, the UK, and Australia – but, curiously enough, not the EU. The EU legislated to introduce a human rights sanctions regime, but it stopped short of enacting a corruption sanctions program, despite the pledge to do so by the European Commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen. While one might be tempted to criticize the EU’s reticence, the real question is: why should governments consider introducing corruption sanctions, and how can they use them effectively?

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Measure Corrupt Conduct — Not Corruption

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The new Handbook of Research Methods for Corruption Studies, edited by corruption guru extraordinaire Michael Johnston, offers a wealth of learning about how to fight corruption. None more important than Alina Mungiu-Pippidi’s chapter analyzing the fundamental question in the fight: how do we know if we are winning?

Decades after corruption control rose to the top of the global agenda, assaying how well the fight is going ought to be straightforward. That’s not so as the continuing debate about the validity of TI’s Corruption Perceptions Index, the World Bank’s Control of Corruption measure, and the many other measurement tools on offer shows.

The problem, as Professor Johnston acknowledges in the Handbook’s introduction, is foundational.

“After 40 years of debate about corruption, we are still uncertain about what we are talking about. . . cannot measure it directly. [and don’t know if] a single [corruption] score about a whole country really tells us much.”

What Professor Mungiu-Pippidi shows in her chapter is that the foundational problem is behind our inability to measure progress in fighting corruption. That efforts to gauge success have foundered on misguided attempts to propound a universal, all-encompassing definition of corruption which have produced nothing more than vague, imprecise measures riddled with practical and methodological errors. She explains why these should be scrapped and offers in their stead a series of direct, fact-based indicators for evaluating progress tied to a specific, bounded definition.

Professor Mungiu-Pippidi’s chapter deserves the closest attention by policymakers, evaluators, and citizens who want to know if an anticorruption law, policy, or strategy is making a difference. This post builds on and complements her work in two ways.

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