Author Archives: Richard Messick

April 23 – 25 Conference: Global Cities — Joining Forces Against Corruption

Posted on by
Reply
As previously noted on this blog, the Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity will be hosting an exciting conference at Columbia Law School next week, Global Cities: Joining Forces Against Corruption. Featuring Mexico City Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera Espinosa, and Athens Mayor Georgios Kaminis the April 23-25 conference will bring together high-level integrity officials from 14 cities across six continents to discuss the challenges of fighting corruption and to share successful strategies and best practices. Other speakers  include a senior member of the Ukrainian parliament, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Investigation, and the Comptroller General of Peru. Followers of this blog may be interested to know that this writer will speak on a panel Saturday morning, called “Bridging Political Boundaries: Partnering with National and State Government.”
The conference is free and open to the public and eligible for CLE credit for New York lawyers. A copy of the agenda, and a registration link, are available here. I hope to see some of you there!

The OECD Report on Corruption in Sectors: Will it Hurt the Brand?

Posted on by
3

Consequences of Corruption at the Sector Level and Implications for Economic Growth and Development is the OECD’s latest report on corruption. Released March 25, it was written at the request of G-20 governments and follows an earlier one the organization did for the G-20’s September 2013 meeting.  Whereas that report examined the impact of corruption on rates of economic growth and levels of development, this one adopts a micro perspective, analyzing the effect of corruption and suggesting ways to fight it for four sectors of national economies: i) extractive industries, ii) utilities and infrastructure, iii) health, and iv) education. Among its more striking conclusions:

  • ”independent, competent and better regulatory and law enforcement systems” are critical for combating corruption;
  • “transparency should be an integral component of all anti-corruption strategies;” and
  • “anti-corruption measures must . . . be targeted and tailored.”

Additional examples of focused, cutting edge policy recommendations can be found by clicking “Continue reading.” Continue reading →

Disclosure Rules and Political Corruption: The Lessons of the Menendez Case

Posted on by
5

On April 1, 2015, the United States Department of Justice issued a 68 page indictment charging U.S. Senator Robert Menendez and Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Florida ophthalmologist, with 22 separate violations of American federal criminal law arising from their long running relationship.  The Department alleges that Dr. Melgen provided Senator Menendez “domestic and international flights on private jets, first-class domestic airfare, use of a Caribbean villa, access to an exclusive Dominican resort, a stay at a luxury hotel in Paris, expensive meals, golf outings, and tens of thousands of dollars in contributions to a legal defense fund.” In return the Department claims that Senator Menendez used his position as a member of the U.S. Senate to advance Dr. Melgen’s personal and business interests.

If both Dr. Melgen and Senator Menendez stand by their initial responses to the indictment, prosecutors will find it very hard to prove that Melgen bribed Menendez.  The doctor and the Senator are not disputing the facts; what they say is that they are friends and what each did for the other was motivated by friendship.  To overcome this “gifts from a friend” defense, prosecutors must prove that what was in the minds of the two men when the gifts passed was not friendship but corruption.  Showing what was in a defendant’s mind is always difficult and is even more difficult when the defendant offers a plausible, benign alternative. So unless the Department intends to call a mind reader as a witness, proving the 21 charges of bribery or acts relating to bribery in the indictment will be a challenge.

That’s what makes the 22nd charge so important.

Continue reading →

Fighting Corruption:  Lessons from Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Posted on by
1

Over the last few years a number of studies have appeared analyzing the lessons learned from the first decade of anticorruption policies.  The most recent is  Why Corruption Matters: Understanding Causes, Effects and How to Address Them reviewed March 18 on this blog.  Others are: the U4 Anticorruption Resource Center’s Mapping Evidence Gaps in Anticorruption; Kennedy School Professor Rema Hanna and colleagues’ The Effectiveness of Anticorruption Policy: What has Worked, What Hasn’t, and What We Know; The Norwegian Aid Agency’s Joint Evaluation of Support to Anticorruption Efforts, 2002 – 2009; Contextual Choices in Fighting Corruption: Lessons Learned by Hertie School Professor Alina Mungiu-Pipidi and associates; the report by GRECO, or the Group of States against Corruption, Lessons Learnt from the Three Evaluation Rounds (2000 – 2010): Thematic Articles; and the analysis by the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, A Review of World Bank Support for Accountability Institutions in the Context of Governance and Anticorruption. While each merits study, I thought it useful to highlight some of the important findings of each in a series of posts over the coming weeks.

Today’s entry summarizes a valuable contribution to this “lessons learned” literature by the Anticorruption Network for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, a regional outreach program of the OECD’s Working Group on Bribery whose members include the nations of Eastern Europe and Central Asia and OECD member states.  As part of the network’s activities eight countries – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan – volunteered to have their anticorruption policies judged by their peers against the standards in the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, other international conventions, and international best practice.  Anticorruption Reforms in Eastern Europe and Central Asia: Progress and Challenges, 2009 -2013 sums up the lessons from the latest round of review of these eight countries efforts to combat corruption. Continue reading →

Is Going Local the Answer? OxFam America’s New Report: “To Fight Corruption, Localize Aid”

Posted on by
15

In a new report on U.S. foreign assistance, To Fight Corruption, Localize Aid, OxFam America urges radical changes in the way the United States helps developing nations combat corruption.  Providing funds to strengthen anticorruption agencies, write new laws, and other traditional “top-down, donor-driven methods of fighting corruption” have had little impact on corruption the American member of the international Oxfam confederation asserts.  U.S. aid should thus be redirected to “locally driven approaches” to fighting corruption.  By this the report means U.S. assistance would go directly to “local change agents” so that they could “tackle institutional challenges, including corruption, in their towns, cities, and countries.”

The rhetoric of a community-based, “bottom up” approach to fighting corruption has an appealing ring, and the report showcases successful efforts to combat corruption at the local level in Guatemala, Liberia, and the Philippines to support its claims.  But a closer reading of these stories, and of the report itself, shows that the rhetoric outstrips the reality.

Continue reading →

New DfID Report: Few Donor-Supported Anticorruption Policies Effective

Posted on by
2

The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development released a new report February 25 summarizing the learning on corruption in developing nations and how to combat it.  Why Corruption Matters: Understanding Causes, Effects and How to Address Them was commissioned to help donor agency staff who advise on anticorruption policies and to assist in the design of programs to control corruption.  As its title advertises, the report examines three issues: the causes of corruption; its costs, both financial and non-financial; and what measures reduce it.  Those searching for what developing nations can do to fight corruption will turn immediately to chapter 5, “Anticorruption Measures,” which evaluates a variety of different efforts to control corruption from ratifying UNCAC to reforming customs and tax agencies to conducting public expenditure tracking surveys.

Readers looking for new steps developing countries can take to control corruption or confirmation that the standard approaches are working will be disappointed.  Few interventions have had any effect, and with one exception, the evidence showing these have had an impact is thin.

Continue reading →

A Mexican Candidate’s Income and Asset Declaration Lambasted as “Amazing,” “Absurd,” “Inconsistent”   

Posted on by
7

Under pressure from civil society, Mexican officials are starting to come clean about their personal finances, but as Marcelo Ebrard, a candidate in this June’s parliamentary elections, has learned, a half-baked disclosure of one’s financial life can backfire.  His disclosure drew nothing but scorn from the experts the on-line journal Sinembargo had review it. They found it implausible that a senior member of the Mexican political establishment claimed to own no house and to earn less than 150,000 pesos (~ $9,600) a month after leaving high office.  They questioned why money he received from his political party was not disclosed, contracts that might create conflict of interest were he elected not revealed, and his wife’s assets not reported.  What he released did not meet international standards for financial disclosure, and the disclosure, they bemoaned, was thus a “lost opportunity” to establish a new benchmark for transparency by political candidates.

While these criticisms may harm Ebrard’s chances of being elected to Mexico’s lower house of parliament, that he had to release a financial statement and that civil society invested the time and effort to examine it are both encouraging signs that Mexico’s anticorruption movement is taking off. Continue reading →

Are We Underestimating the Extent of Bribery in the World?

Posted on by
8

The astounding figure Richard Rose and Caryn Peiffer report in their new book, Paying Bribes for Public Services, that almost one quarter of world’s population or 1.6 billion people, recently paid a bribe would suggest the answer to the question above is a resounding “No.”  The 1.6 billion figure sounds so fantastically large that the suspicion arises that it is one of those gauzy numbers conjured up using shaky assumptions and questionable sources to capture headlines rather than advance learning.  Yet recent research by the World Bank’ Art Kraay and University of Maryland Professor Peter Murrell shows that, if anything, the Rose and Peiffer 1.6 billion number is low.

Their figure is based on the most solid of evidence: interviews by phone or in-person where respondents are asked whether they had to pay a bribe to obtain a public service.  Transparency International’s 2013 Global Corruption Barometer, a main source for the 1.6 billion number, is an example.  Surveyors first ask respondents if they or anyone else in their household has had any contact in the past 12 months with anyone associated with any of eight government services: i) the education system, ii) the judiciary, iii) medical or health services, iv) the police, v) registry and permit services, vi) utilities, vii) tax collection or, viii) land service.  If the answer is yes, the surveyor then asks:

In your contact or contacts have you or anyone living in your household paid a bribe in any form in the past 12 months?    

What could be a more reliable way to gather evidence of bribery?  Instead of asking what people think about bribery or what their perceptions of bribery or corruption are, they are asked about their own personal experience, or that of close relatives, with the crime of bribery.  The rub comes with the last phrase in the preceding sentence: the respondent is being questioned about “the crime of bribery.”

Continue reading →

Anticorruption Policymaking: The Critical Role of Information

Posted on by
9

“. . . [S]ound policies require good information – about the existence, nature, and causes of a problem, about the costs and benefits to the affected public of various possible solutions to the problem, and about the effectiveness of current policies.” Peter H. Schuck, Why Government Fails So Often: And How it Can Do Better. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 162.

Few axioms of policymaking would seem as self-evident as the one above, and few are so often observed in the breach.  Developing the knowledge required for good policymaking can be expensive, time-consuming, and intellectually challenging.  At the same time, policymakers are often under pressure to act; the problem is urgent; the public demands a solution, and they want to address the nation’s ills, or at least appear to address them, quickly.  So policy is made on the basis of incomplete data, hunches, intuition, and plain guesswork. The unfortunate result, as the title of Schuck’s book advertises, is almost always a policy failure.

Anticorruption is an area that seems particularly prone to policymaking on the fly.  In 2007 the U4 Anticorruption Resource Centre examined different countries experiences developing and implementing a national anticorruption strategy.  A major finding: “information, knowledge, and understanding of corruption continue to be a great weakness for the formulation and prioritization of anticorruption initiatives . . . .”  A more recent review of national anticorruption strategies Matthew and I have underway for the UNODC suggests matters have changed little in the intervening years. Countries as different as India, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Thailand have constructed detailed, complex strategies for combating corruption on a thin to non-existent knowledge base.

Given the challenges of building a sound knowledge base for anticorruption policymaking, it is easy to understand why this critical step in the process is so often ignored. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Zambia’s Director of Public Prosecutions Describes Efforts to Unconstitutionally Remove Him for Prosecuting former President

Posted on by
4

Below is a February 16 letter Mutembo Nchito, Zambia’s Director of Public Prosecutions, wrote to fellow prosecutors recounting recent efforts to have him removed from office. Links have been added to some of the references cited.

Dear Colleagues,

I trust you are well. I have had an eventful 10 or so days that I feel duty bound to share with you.

As some of you may know Zambia lost its fifth President October 28, 2014. This is the President that requested me to join the public service as Director of Public Prosecutions. My mandate was to transform the Ministry of Justice’s Department of Public Prosecutions into an autonomous National Prosecution Authority. This I embarked on with a reasonable measure of success.

That said one of the main reasons I was hired was my history of anticorruption prosecution. Since 2002 I have prosecuted many cases of high profile corruption that have seen me indict two former presidents, a chief of intelligence,  a Zambia Army Commander, a Zambia Air Force commander and a commander of another defence force called the Zambia National Service. I also prosecuted a former Minister of Finance and his permanent secretaries for corruption and abuse of office among many other high profile individuals.

Except for the first president who was acquitted in very controversial circumstances most, if not all the cases I prosecuted, resulted in convictions. As you can imagine this has earned me very powerful enemies. Continue reading →