Author Archives: Richard Messick

Guest Post: Corruption in Water Resources Management? Not Our Job Say Water-Sector Professionals

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Today’s Guest Post is by Juliette Martinez-Rossignol, a graduate student of Political Economy of Development at Sciences Po, Paris, and at the London School of Economics; Laura Jean Palmer-Moloney, a hydro-geographer and consultant with Visual Teaching Technologies specializing in wetlands ecology and hydrology; and Mark Pyman a leader in corruption prevention efforts and co-founder of CurbingCorruption.

It is hard to imagine an area where corruption has a greater impact than in the management and distribution of the world’s supply of water. Examples abound. Locally, as in the misuse of water in a municipality; regionally, as in unregulated diversions in watersheds; and globally, as in corrupt mismanagement of marine protected areas or the diversion of funds intended to combat climate change.

We asked a cross-section of those who have devoted their professional careers to managing the world’s water supply what they were doing to combat corruption in the sector.  Interviewees included engineers in water utilities in the U.S., Mexico, and elsewhere, environmental lawyers, geographers, geologists, ocean economy investors, ecosystem scientists, natural resources managers, plus water anti-corruption practitioners and journalists to.

What we found is enormously troublesome.

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Preventing Corruption in the Reconstruction of Ukraine

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It is clear Russia’s attempt to break Ukrainians’ will to fight by attacking the nation’s critical infrastructure is failing. No matter how much destruction its constant bombardments wreak on power plants, district heating systems, and the other facilities that support daily life, Ukrainians remain determined to recover every inch of territory the invaders now hold.

Helping to shore up Ukraine’s determination is the commitment its Western partners have made to financing its reconstruction. But as donors pledge their support, concerns are being raised about corruption. It is no secret that at the time Russia attacked, Ukraine was still struggling with the ingrained corruption it inherited from Soviet rule and the post-Soviet oligarchs who grabbed money and power in the first years of independence still retained a grip on the levers of power..

The Ukrainian government must the lead the fight against corruption during reconstruction; draft legislation now circulating in Kyiv recognizes this. All funds would be channeled through an independent government entity with a 20-person board of directors of which 15 would be drawn from donor organizations and five would be Ukrainian officials. That the majority will be drawn from outside Ukraine is a critical provision, one that should reassure donors that oversight will not be wanting.

A second critical provision is that the entity would have a strong internal audit department reporting directly to the board of directors. The proposed bill provides the department would conduct financial audits, ensure the fund operates within the law, that information the board requested was supplied, and that managers did not act beyond their authorized duties.

As important as these provisions are, they are mainly backwards looking, aimed at identifying where corruption has occurred. More important is preventing it in the first place.

Ukrainian officials and their partners should thus include strong prevention measures in the final draft. All contractors should have an anticorruption compliance program that has been independently certified to be compliance with the standards for an antibribery management system found in ISO 37001. The legislation should also create a prevention department. One model is the one the Millennium Challenge Corporation has. Its unit trains grantees responsible for overseeing construction projects in the creation of a risk register and development of an action plan to reduce if not eliminate corruption in both the award and execution of construction contracts. Regular field visits monitor how well grantees are doing in implementing their action plan.

Current estimates are that rebuilding Ukraine will run upwards of $350 billion, a number sure to grow as Russian bombs continue to fall. That Western nations are prepared to invest such an extraordinary sum in rebuilding a victim of aggression is the most reassuring sign to date that despite economic turmoil, social upheaval, and the election of demagogues, there is indeed a broad and deep global consensus on the value of a liberal, democratic order. Every step possible should be taken to ensure corruption does not undermine it.

Guest Post: U.K. Court Refuses to Compensate Victims of Foreign Bribery

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Today’s Guest Post is by Dr Helen Taylor, senior legal researcher at Spotlight on Corruption, a charity that shines a light on the United Kingdom’s role in corruption at home and abroad. Helen leads Spotlight’s court monitoring programme, tracking the enforcement of the UK’s anti-corruption law in major court cases and building an evidence base for advocacy and policy recommendations on asset recovery, victim compensation, and other corruption-related issues.

Last week a London court fined commodities giant Glencore for bribing officials in five African oil producing nations in return for getting “special deals” on their oil. While the court ordered the company to pay £280 million (just over $318 million) for its numerous violations of the U.K. foreign bribery law, it refused to direct Glencore to compensate those its bribes injured: the governments and citizens of the five nations. In fact, victims did not even get a foot in the courtroom door — the Serious Fraud Office, which prosecuted the case, refused to put a compensation request before the court, and the court itself rejected the Nigerian government’s application for compensation.

The case brings home the pressing need to reform the UK’s compensation framework to ensure overseas victims are represented and compensated in complex corruption cases.

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November 2 OSCE Webinar: Asset Recovery and the Concept of Social Reuse

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The OSCE Polish Chairpersonship and the Office of the Coordinator of the OSCE Economic and Environmental Activities are holding a series of three webinars on the contribution of the OSCE in preventing corruption and promoting transparency and good governance as part of resilient economic recovery.

The first webinar is entitled:  Innovations in Asset Recovery in the OSCE: The Concept of Social Reuse was held today November 2, 2022, 3:00 to 4:15 pm CET via Zoom webinar.

Opening remarks 

Ms. Courtney Austrian, Deputy Chief of Mission, United States Mission to the OSCE 

Ambassador Igli Hasani, Co-ordinator of OSCE Economic and Environmental Activities 

Ambassador Alena Kupchyna, OSCE Co-ordinator of Activities to Address Transnational Threats 

Speakers: 

Mr. Tristram Hicks, OSCE Asset Recovery Advisor 

Mr. Andrea D’Angelo, Senior Project Manager, Balkan Asset Management Interagency Network (BAMIN) Secretariat  

Ms. Melika Sahinovic, OSCE Expert on Social Re-Use in BiH 

Moderator: Prof. Anita Ramasastry, Special Representative of the OSCE Chairmanship on Combating Corruption 

Asset recovery is a powerful anti-corruption tool ensuring that stolen assets and proceeds of criminal activities are given back to societies and victims of crime.  It remains one of the most effective ways to disrupt serious and organized crime as organized crime groups survive and thrive through illicit financial gains. 

Since 2019, OSCE has been implementing a cross-dimensional project that aims at building the capacities of national authorities and civil society organizations (CSOs) in Southeast Europe and improving regional collaboration in the seizing, confiscating, managing and re-using of criminal assets. Phase II of the project that has just been launched has also been extended to Eastern Europe (Moldova and Ukraine). The project adopts a comprehensive approach to asset recovery and includes three areas of intervention: i) financial investigations, asset seizure and confiscation; ii) asset management; and iii) asset re-use. 

Details for connecting —

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Twentieth International Anticorruption Conference December 6-10 in Washington, D.C.

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One mark of the progress in putting the fight against corruption on the global agenda is the size and scope of this year’s International Anticorruption Conference. The first one drew less that 200 people, mostly law enforcement personnel from the United States and 12 other nations (here). Organizers expect this year’s — December 6 through 12 in Washington — to attract more than 2,000 representatives of government, civil society, and the private sector from 135+ nations with many more attending virtually.

Jointly organized by Transparency International and the the U.S. government, speakers include: Delia Ferreiro, Chair of the Transparency International Board of Directors; David Malpass, President of the World Bank; Adesina Akinwumi, President of the African Development Bank; Ghada Waly, Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime; Samantha Power, Administrator for the United States Agency for International Development; the heads of the Open Government Partnership, the Financial Action Task Force, CIVICS, and the chief executives of several multinational corporations.

The theme of this year’s conference is “Uprooting Corruption, Defending Democratic Values.” Plenary sessions will address the “grand issues:” global security, defending the defenders, kleptocracy and illicit finance.  There will be over 60 workshops, and multiple special thematic events and social gatherings.

More on who is coming, workshop and thematic events, and how to register is here.

OECD Denounces Italy’s Failure to Enforce the Antibribery Convention

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GAB readers know that Italy has repeatedly failed to meet its obligations under the OECD Antibribery Convention (here. here, and here). That in recent high-profile cases where evidence Italian companies bribed officials of foreign governments was overwhelming, the companies, their executives, and accomplices were all acquitted.  And that civil society organizations in Italy, Nigeria, and the United Kingdom have urged the OECD in no uncertain terms to condemn the Italian government’s blatant violation of its obligation to levy “effective, proportionate, and dissuasive criminal penalties” on those who bribe foreign public officials (here).  

Last Friday, the OECD did exactly that. In a comprehensive, well-reasoned report, a model for future compliance reviews, its Working Group on Bribery in International Business Transactions fingered both the legislature and the judiciary for Italy’s noncompliance. The legislature because the sanctions for foreign bribery are too low to deter anyone or any company from paying a bribe, the judiciary for interpreting the rules of evidence in ways that almost invariably end in acquitting defendants.

Indeed, it is hard to read the Working Group’s analysis of the decisions in recent cases without concluding as I have that underneath the strained reasoning in the recent acquittals is some mix of bribery, favoritism, or threats.

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Pictures are Worth More than a Thousand Words: Especially in Financial Crime Cases

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That fount of all wisdom (the internet) attributes the saying that a picture is worth a 1,000 words to Napoleon (here). The self-crowned emperor was many things, but a harried anticorruption investigator or prosecutor trying to explain the links between a criminal’s wrongdoing and a corporation to a judge of less than genius caliber or a jury after the lunch break he was not. Had he ever been in such a situation, he would have realized he vastly understated a picture’s value.

The diagrams below show why. Created by Targeting Natural Resource Corruption, they explain to those responsible for enforcing laws against poaching, illegal logging, and other crimes against the earth’s resources how a corporation obscures the relationship between these crimes and those behind them. For those like me, with no visual imagination or skill whatsoever, they are a godsend. Because they are easily reproducible and not copyrighted. Thanks to Targeting Natural Resources for making them readily available.

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Will the OECD Whitewash Italy’s Flagrant Violations of the OECD Antibribery Convention?

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Italy’s compliance with the OECD Antibribery Convention will reportedly be reviewed this week by the OECD’s Working Group on Bribery in International Business Transactions.  The Convention’s review mechanism has been called “the gold standard” for evaluating compliance with an international agreement (here). Whether it deserves that billing will depend on what the Working Group says about Italy’s compliance.

As with all compliance reviews, the Working Group has before it a report prepared by experts from two other Convention parties documenting whether Italy has lived up to its promise to investigate foreign bribery by its nationals. From the public record alone, on which the experts were well informed (here, here, here, here, and here), it is impossible to believe their report is anything but strongly critical.

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Accountability Time for Sri Lanka’s Rajapakse Clan?

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In a groundbreaking order issued October 7, Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court ordered five members of the Rajapakse family and accomplices to answer for driving the once prosperous nation into bankruptcy.  

While Gotabaya was president and three brothers and a nephew ministers, the government took on ever greater levels of foreign debt while recklessly cutting taxes and pursuing unsustainable monetary policies. The result: the economy is expected shrink by 8.7 percent this year, inflation recently exceeded 60 percent, and an additional 2.7 million Sri Lankans will likely fall into abject poverty (here and here).

As economic conditions deteriorated in late spring, the four Rajapkse ministers resigned, and Gotabaya later fled the country as protesters stormed the presidential residence (here). But though out of office, the Rajapakses are not out of power. They still control parliament, and it picked a Rajapkse crony to serve the remainder of Gotabaya’s term as president.

With parliament unlikely to hold the Rajapkses accountable for economic mismanagement and the corruption that underlay it, civil society turned to the one institution in the country that remained largely untouched during the Rajapakse’s misrule: the judiciary.  Last June Transparency International Sri Lanka and three prominent Sri Lankans asked the nation’s highest court to hear their claim that the result of the Rajapakses’ economic mismanagement their constitutional rights to equal treatment, freedom to pursue gainful work, and access to government information had been denied. The petition further asks that:

  • the Central Bank, Finance Ministry, and other agencies be required to produce documents chronicling the mismanagement,
  • a committee be empaneled to examine the documents and compile a report, and
  • the Attorney General be directed to investigate and prosecute any wrongdoing disclosed.

For those fortunate enough to live in functioning democracies, this action would be extraordinary.  A request that a court assume the powers of a legislature and hold those in charge of the government accountable for their actions.

But given the power the Rajapakses accumulated during their long period in office, it appears to be the only path to accountability.  And to the restoration of the democratic freedoms Sri Lanka’s constitution promises all citizens.  Citizen activists, believers in the rule of law, and democrats everywhere will be hoping Sri Lanka’s judiciary can meet this unprecedented challenge.

Prompting Procurement Law Reform: The World Bank’s Benchmarking Public Procurement Series

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No government activity is as vulnerable to corruption as public procurement. The procedures governments employ when deciding what to buy, how much of it to buy, and from whom to buy it provide countless opportunities for greedy officials and their private sector accomplices to profit at citizens’ expense. No serious effort to curb corruption can therefore avoid a careful scrub of a nation’s procurement law.

The best scrubbing tools are found in the World Bank’s series Benchmarking Public Procurement.  As the name proclaims, each report in the series provides standards against which the quality of a nation’s or even a province or local government’s procurement law can be gauged. Begun with a 2015 pilot examining public-private partnership contracts in a handful of countries, the most recent volume, published in 2020, assays the rules for letting PPPs in 140 jurisdictions and the rules in 40 for the award of infrastructure contracts from public funds (a 2017 report covers publicly-funded procurement contracts in 180).

Procurement is a devilishly complex area of policy. Untutored anticorruption advocates looking for corruption-reducing reforms can quickly find themselves stymied by the maze of rules governing procurement decisions and the status quo-bias of procurement staff and government suppliers. Benchmarking offers a way around these obstacles. A way to open a discussion about procurement policy and where laws or practices need changing between anticorruption reformers and the procurement community.

The 2020 edition examines how countries fare against standard practice on 160 plus areas. Not everyone will agree that all 160 plus benchmarks are best practice, and many will wish for explicit anticorruption benchmarks like those described here were included. But the critical step is to begin a dialogue on reforming a nation’s procurement law, and the Bank’s Benchmarking series is the best vehicle yet for sparking one. I hope a new updated and expanded edition is in the cards.