Author Archives: Richard Messick

South African Court Slaps Down Attack on Corruption Prosecutor

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Early Wednesday a South African judge ruled that former President Jacob Zuma’s attacks on the prosecutor leading the case him were baseless and that Zuma’s trial on corruption charges proceed forthwith. Zuma had claimed prosecutor William Downer’s conduct in pursuing the case was so egregious — running the gamut from the commission of serious crimes, to breaches of ethics, to intimations of racial animus — that the charges against him must be dismissed. Or, at the least, Downer be removed from the case and trial therefore delayed indefinitely while a new prosecutor was found.  

In seeing through Zuma’s desperate attempt to derail the case, and standing up to the still powerful former president, Judge Piet Koen provided a model judges everywhere should follow.  When Zuma raised the unfounded, scurrilous attacks on the prosecutor, Koen ordered they be aired without delay.  Upon sifting through the evidence, he promptly issued a scholarly 109-page opinion finding that not one of the allegations withstood scrutiny and that there was therefore no basis to find Downer was not a fair-minded, independent prosecutor and hence no reason Zuma would not receive a fair trial if Downer remained on the case.

Today’s 61-page decision came in response to that earlier decision. Zuma had requested that the trial be halted while he appealed it.  In again a scholarly and carefully written decision, Koen knocked down the legal arguments offered in support of an appeal while reiterating the absence of any facts showing Downer guilty of misconduct or bias.

Zuma has done his best to pressure the judge into throwing out or delaying the case, with hundreds of supporters crowding into the courthouse and surrounding grounds at his every appearance to let their views be known and with some issuing not so veiled threats against the judge. Koen could have easily caved, finding merit to the claims or a way to put off the trial for months if not years.

That he did not and that he instead set the trial for this April stands in marked contrast to the way attacks on Nigerian, Zambian, and Italian prosecutors have been handled (here, here, and here). Rather than standing up for them, judges, justice ministry officials, and even fellow prosecutors stood aside after the attacks were launched with some collaborating with the attackers. If corrupt officials and their accomplices are to face justice, Judge Koen’s response must become the standard when those prosecuting them come under attack.  

Will the Nigerian Judiciary Stand Up for the Rule of Law and Dismiss the Suraju Case?

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The Nigerian judiciary’s commitment to upholding the rule of law faces a decisive test this Monday, February 7. Nigerian prosecutors will present evidence to Federal High Court Justice Binta Nyakothat that anticorruption activist Olanrewaju Suraju should stand trial for violating section 24 of the Cybercrime Act 2015, the cyberstalking provision.

As explained below, the evidence in support of the charges is extraordinarily flimsy. More importantly, section 24 is no longer enforceable in Nigeria. The Community Court of Justice for the Economic Community of West African States, whose decisions bind all Nigerian courts, ruled in 2020 that the cyberstalking section was so vague and open-ended that it violated the freedom of expression provisions of the African Peoples and Human Rights Charter and hence was invalid (here). Justice Nyakothat should therefore immediately dismiss the charges against Suraju.

The only conceivable reason she might not is if she is under “extra-legal” pressure from those who stand to gain from the case being continued.

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All Nations Should Outlaw Tumbling or Mixing Cryptocurrencies

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The prosecutions of currency exchanges Helix (here) and Bitcoin Fog (here) show the dark side of virtual currency. As providers of what the Financial Action Task Force terms money or value transfer services, the two accepted a customer’s funds and returned a corresponding sum or product to the customer or third party for a fee.

Helix and Bitcoin both specialized in bitcoin transactions. A customer would buy something on the web and rather than sending the merchant bitcoins directly, the customer sent them through Helix or Bitcoin Fog. That way, the customer did not have to worry about contacting the seller directly, and moreover, if the seller did not accept bitcoins, Helix or Bitcoin Fog would convert the bitcoins into whatever currency the seller accepted.

What caught the U.S. Department of Justice’s eye is that the two exchanges “tumbled” or “mixed” the customer’s bitcoins as part of their service.

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Making Release of the CPI into Something Useful in the Fight Against Corruption

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Yesterday’s release of the Corruption Perceptions Index prompted the annual, dreary, unproductive pattern of overblown press releases and gnashing of teeth. Critics cite their government’s failure to sharply increase its CPI score as an excuse for issuing press releases bashing it for failings of every kind. The teeth gnashing comes from those in governments doing their best to fight corruption and frustrated that their efforts have had no discernable impact on the score.

No part of my work helping countries curb corruption has been more frustrating than trying to explain to the media, dedicated government corruption fighters, and civil society that they should stop making such a fuss about yearly changes in CPI scores. As Matthew reiterated in yesterday’s post (for the umpteenth time), short-term comparisons are “a pointless, misleading, intellectually bankrupt exercise.” But my explanations, GAB posts, and the academic literature explaining in excruciating detail why it takes years if not decades for anticorruption reforms to affect a nation’s CPI score have all fallen on deaf ears.

Thankfully, government corruption fighters and their supporters in Nigeria have found a way to use release of the CPI to advance the fight against corruption.  As explained here, last year its Minister of Information and Culture responded to the release of the CPI with a statement describing what the government had done over the past year to prevent corruption. This year the Nigerian Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre, TI’s national chapter, issued a statement putting the CPI in context and highlighting reforms underway and where more needs to be done.

Most importantly, rather than using the release of the CPI to criticize the many Nigerian public servants who spend their days fighting corruption, it went out of its way to applaud them, saying:

“It is important to stress that [the CPI score] is not an assessment of Nigeria’s anti-graft agencies who are making commendable efforts in reducing (in the fight against) corruption in Nigeria despite the political interference they face.

The full text of the Advocacy Centre’s statement follows. It merits close study by all those looking for ways to transform the annual, dreary, unproductive ritual around release of the CPI into something that can help produce results in the fight against corruption.

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Papers from Conference on Empirical Approaches To Anti-Money Laundering And Financial Crime Suppression

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The papers to be delivered at the Central Bank of the Bahamas third annual international conference on Empirical Approaches to Anti-Money Laundering and Financial Crime Suppression are now available here.  The conference brings together a mixture of academics and practitioners to assess what we know and don’t know about curbing money laundering. The conference schedule and instructions on virtual attendance is here.

Papers likely of special interest to GAB readers include –

  • Enabling African loots: Tracking the laundering of Nigerian kleptocrats’ ill-gotten gains
  • Conceptual Framework for the Statistical Measurement of Illicit Financial Flows
  • Complex Ownership Structures: Addressing the Risks for Beneficial Ownership Transparency
  • Dirty Money: How Banks Influence Financial Crime
  • Does Changing the Rules Change Behaviour? Comparing Regulatory Reform and Behavioral Outcomes in Shell Company Transparency

Has Nigeria Found A Way to Make Release of the CPI Useful?

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Transparency International releases its 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index this January 25, and while many will welcome the attention it puts on corruption, for others release will mean nothing but headaches. They will spend that day and the days and perhaps weeks after trying to explain why their country’s score on the CPI has little or nothing to do with how well the country is doing in the fight against corruption.  

For regulars in the corruption battle, this is common knowledge (distilled here, here, and here).  They know the value of the CPI lies in the pressure release puts on governments to take the fight against corruption seriously – not in measuring the progress a government is making in the fight. But presidents, prime ministers, parliamentarians, and assorted national kibitzers don’t. Sporadic followers of the corruption issue, on January 25 they will read that their nation ranks worse on the CPI than some neighboring county, a rival, or Denmark, Norway, or Singapore. They will demand to know why. Or at least why efforts over the past year have not paid off in a better ranking.

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When you Fight Corruption, it Fights Back

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Nuhu Ribadu, first head of Nigeria’s premier anticorruption agency, famously made the observation that headlines this post sometime between the first and second attempt on his life. Speakers at “Anticorruption Prosecutors Under Attack, a side event at the just completed Conference of State Parties to the UN Convention Against Corruption, explained that he is not the only one whose life, career, and reputation have come under attack from those being investigated for corruption.  

Organized by the government of Norway and the Basel Institute on Governance, the event publicized cases like Nuhu’s (here) and the late Maxwell Nkole of Zambia (here), corruption fighters who fled their homeland to escape assassination. Speakers discussed more recent cases too, including the less lethal but more insidious attack against Italian prosecutors Fabio Pasquale and Sergio Spadaro. The two face trumped up criminal charges and administrative proceedings for having the audacity to prosecute two large, Western oil companies for bribing Nigerian officials (here).

Maxwell and Nuhu likely survived the attempts to silence them permanently thanks to the Corruption Hunter Network. The brainchild of Eva Joly, France’s premier anticorruption fighter and supported by the Norwegian government, the group of anticorruption investigators, prosecutors, and activists meets twice a year to provide one another moral support. It scrounged up funding for year-long “sabbaticals” for Nuhu and Maxwell in countries where their enemies dared not to touch them.

Nuhu and Maxwell’s support was ad hoc and thanks only to a handful of bureaucrats willing to read internal agency guidelines “liberally.” As the fight against corruption intensifies, we can expect more Nuhus, Maxwells, Fabios, and Sergios. Will those in the international community committed to the fight against corruption support these frontline troops?

The full video of “Anticorruption Prosecutors Under Attack” is here, the audio file here. More on the event, the speakers, and the key takeaways is on the Basel Institute’s website here.

Eliminating Barriers to Compensating Corruption Victims  

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StAR yesterday held six panels on asset recovery issues as part of the meeting of the Conference of State Parties to UNCAC. I participated in the one on compensating corruption victims along with Costa Rican prosecutor Greysa Barrientos, Kate McMahon, Chair the International Bar Association’s Anticorruption Asset Recovery Subcommittee Kate McMahon, and Juanita Olaya Garcia of the UNCAC Coalition.

Panel moderators Yara Esquivel of StAR and Felipe Falconi from UNODC asked that I discuss what avenues of relief were available to corruption victims, the main challenges they face in recovering damages, and what reforms are needed to overcome those challenges. My remarks follow.   

Avenues of relief. Corruption victims generally have two options for obtaining compensation – as an adjunct to a criminal prosecution of the perpetrators by the state or by bringing a private civil suit against them.

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Civil Society to the CoSP: Corruption Victims Are Entitled to Compensation

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The Council of State Parties to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, the governments of the now 188 nations that have ratified the Convention, meets this week to review its implementation.  

When it comes to prosecuting bribery, embezzlement, and other corruption crimes, progress has been made. The UN Office of Drugs and Crime reports that “[i]n a considerable number of countries, legislative amendments and structural reforms have produced coherent and largely harmonized criminalization regimes, tangible results in terms of enforcement capabilities and action.”

But the Convention’s “enforcement capabilities and action” extend beyond criminal prosecution.  Article 35 requires state parties to ensure those injured “as a result of an act of corruption” can enforce a claim for damages against the perpetrators.

Here little progress has been made.  The UNODC, Transparency International, academics (here and here), and this writer have all found that few corruption victims have recovered damages. 

The UNCAC Coalition, a global network of over 350 civil society organizations in 100 plus countries, urges the CoSP to address this gap in implementation.  In a formal submission, the coalition offers a series of recommendations to see that victims, either individually or through a class or representative action, can recover full compensation for the harm caused by corruption. It’s timely and important submission is here.

Italy: Safe Haven for Bribe Payers?

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That a nation with the third-largest economy in the European Union and the eighth-largest in the world would be countenancing bribery in today’s world seems beyond the pale. Yet an analysis of recent case law and record of convictions shows just that.  Done by the Italian NGO ReCommon and submitted on a confidential basis to the OECD’s Working Group on Bribery, it concludes that it is “nigh on impossible to obtain a conviction in Italy for international corruption.”  

The group’s conclusion rests not only on Italy’s dismal record of convictions of Italian companies and nationals for bribing foreign public officials, but decisions in three recent cases. All raise a virtually insurmountable hurdle to a conviction for bribery. In any case. No matter whether the bribe-taker is an official of a foreign government or of the Italian government. In all three, courts have ruled that to prove bribery, the prosecution must show there was an express agreement to bribe.

In today’s world, just how many businesses send a letter to an official saying “I will pay you X in return for your providing the company Y”? As an American Supreme Court justice observed some 40 years ago, were the law to impose such a requirement, it could be easily frustrated “by knowing winks and nods.” Yet an express agreement to bribe is exactly what Italian judges now demand to convict bribe-takers and payors. Why has the Italian judiciary, historically one of the most renowned in the civil law world, decided to frustrate the prosecution of bribery cases?

Italy’s compliance with the OECD Antibribery Convention will shortly be reviewed by peer nations. It simply cannot be found in compliance so long as its courts require an express agreement to bribe to find defendants guilty. The OECD reviewers should follow ReCommon’s analysis, which in the public interest is revealed here, and condemn the recent turn in Italian law making the nation a safe haven for bribery.