Category Archives: Commentary

Seychelles’ Case Sets Precedent for Asset Forfeiture

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U.K. Magistrate District Judge Sam Goozée ruled April 22 that the statute of limitations in a civil forfeiture starts to run only when the National Crime Agency learns of the existence of the assets and their illegal origin (here). As a result, he ordered the forfeiture of some $260,000 in the London bank account of Marinette Soumery, a secretary of Mukesh Valabhji, a former Seychelles government official charged with 11 counts of corruption, abuse of authority of office and money laundering (here).

In its forfeiture application, the NCA linked the money to companies and individuals associated with Valabhji and showed he and Soumery had taken elaborate steps to disguise its source. Because of the “highly suspicious” actions taken to hide where the funds came from, their links to Valabhji and associates, and Soumery and Valabhji’s inability to offer a credible explanation for their origin, the court ordered the money forfeited pursuant to the Proceeds of Crime Act, ruling:

there was “cogent and compelling” evidence giving “rise to an irresistible inference that the money in the account could only have been acquired through criminal activity.”

Statute of Limitation Defense

Soumery’s main defense was that however the funds were acquired, the PCA’s six-year statute of limitations, which runs from when “the property was obtained,” had expired in 2007, the date of the last deposit to the account.

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Legislation to Stop President, VP from Abusing Power to Steal Taxpayer Funds

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On April 15 House and Senate Democrats introduced a bill entitled Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act. Key provisions include:

  • Ban the sitting President/VP from collecting settlement payments from the United States by prohibiting the President, Vice President (VP), their spouses/children, a trust that exists for their benefit, or an entity they own or control, from collecting damages payments from the United States through a settlement or similar agreement with the government the President/VP leads.
  • Pause the filing and processing of a sitting President or VP’s administrative claims by prohibiting federal agencies from processing or fulfilling damages claims brought by the President/VP. Also, prohibit the President/VP from filing administrative claims for damages while in office.
  • Impose guardrails on the President/VP’s federal lawsuits seeking damages by only allowing the President/VP to collect compensatory damages awarded by a federal court if the court appoints an independent counsel to represent the agency and makes all proceedings public.
  • Cooling-off period during a former VP’s term as President, meaning if a former President’s VP is elected President, impose the same restrictions on the former President while the former VP is still in the White House.
  • Impose guardrails on claims by former presidents/VPs by allowing former presidents/VPs to collect damages from the U.S. government, but only if:

Link to more detailed explanation and copy of the bill here.

Transcript and Summary of Webinar on Challenges Facing the OECD Antibribery Convention

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GAB’s trusty intern (NotebookLLM) finally got around to transcribing and summarizing the January webinar where three former chairs of the group charged with enforcing the OECD Antibribery Convention expressed grave concerns about it continued effectiveness.

Promotional image for a webinar titled 'Challenges Facing the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention.' Features four speakers: Martin Wolf, Drago Kos, Mark Pieth, and Danielle Goudriaan, with text overlay and a purple background.

Moderated by Financial Time’s Chief Economics Commentator Martin Wolf, the speakers highlighted several recent, disturbing developments: the U.S. retreat from vigorous enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the weak anticorruption directives the European Commission has issued, and political interference in high-profile bribery cases in Italy. 

At the same time, the three — Mark Pieth, now Professor of Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure and Criminology at the University of Basel; Drago Kos, currently Interim Dean of the International Anti-Corruption Academy; and Danielle Goudriaan, presently partner at a leading Dutch law firm —  offered several paths forward.

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Did Australia Just Set a Record for the Lowest Fine in a Foreign Bribery Case?

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Sydney Morning Herald correspondent Nick McKenzie reports that David Savage, former CEO of the Australian infrastructure giant Leighton Holdings, pled guilty January 30 to covering up the payment of $45 million to corrupt Iraqi politicians (here).

The fine: AUD $1000. About $700 in U.S. dollars.

The possibly record setting fine didn’t escape Australian anticorruption activists’ notice. McKenzie quotes Clancy Moore of Transparency International:

This minuscule fine for a huge multimillion dollar bribery scandal is embarrassing and sends the wrong message to Australian businesses working in high-risk industries like infrastructure and mining,”

The story is behind a paywall. For those without an SMH subscription some especially damning facts include —

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FCPA Enforcement Data 2025

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The graphic is from the 2025 report of the Department of Justice’s Fraud Section. Hard to draw any conclusions about the impact of the Trump Administration’s downgrading FCPA enforcement as the cases largely reflect work begun in Biden Administration and earlier.  Perhaps the fact FCPA cases yielded $122.8 million, far in excess of what it cost to prosecute them, will lead Trump Administration officials to reconsidere cutbacks in FCPA enforcement actions. 

Link to the full report here.

Why Governance Failures Are the Real Root Cause of Financial Crime

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That’s the title of an insightful article on financial crime just posted on NYU’s Compliance and Enforcement blog.  In it author Arun Maheshwar, Executive Director-Head of Model Risk Control, Legal and Compliance at Morgan Stanley, uses the conclusions of numerous enforcement actions across multiple American and foreign jurisdictions to explain why so many organizations private and public are failing to curb employees’ fraud and corruption.

The article is also one more reason why Compliance and Enforcement, sponsored by NYU Law’s Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement, is essential reading for corruption fighters.

To whet GAB readers appetite to click on this link to Maheshwar’s post, excerpts appear below.

“Financial institutions have invested billions of dollars in advanced compliance technology. . . . Yet despite this unprecedented investment, enforcement actions continue to rise in both frequency and severity. . . .

“Across the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union, regulatory findings repeatedly identify the same root causes: unclear accountability, weak escalation, ineffective oversight, fragmented ownership, superficial risk assessments, misaligned incentives, and leadership cultures that treat compliance as a regulatory obligation rather than a core control function. . . .

“Financial crime is a leadership problem. It reflects the values an institution prioritizes, the trade-offs management is willing to make, the incentives that drive behavior, and the accountability structures that shape decision-making.”

Cour de Comptes’ Evaluation of French Anticorruption Policy

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One of brightest spots in the global fight against corruption has been the French turnaround. Once a laggard among developed nations in enforcing anticorruption laws, as former French Finance Minister Michel Sapin and Valentina Lana, Sciences Po lecturer told GAB readers in 2022 (here), over the past decade thanks to both domestic and international pressure numerous reforms have been approved. They include new laws increasing penalties for bribery and imposing stiff sanctions on companies without an anticorruption compliance program and the creation of an anticorruption agency.

The French Cour de comptes, the national audit agency, recently assessed the country’s progress in curbing corruption and what more needs to be done (report here, summary here).  Not surprisingly, at least to GAB readers, the report emphasized the challenge of measuring corruption.

Thanks to Sophie Lemaître, host of the 1st podcast in French on corruption & tax evasion, for flagging the assessment on her LinkedIn page.

Highlights of the report:

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New York Conference Recommendations on the Future of Corruption Measurement

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The central issue in the fight against corruption is how to measure success. Did changes in the way pharmaceuticals are procured and distributed reduce “leakage.” Did strengthening the anticorruption agency and creating fast track corruption courts reduce bribery?

How to assay these reforms were some of the many questions participants debated at a three-day conference on measuring corruption at the UN’s New York headquarters in early December.

The measurement issue starts with the most basic question: what is corruption. Are all gifts to a public official corrupt? Or just those over say $50? There is the conceptual issue: All other things equal, is corruption greater when two officials each take a $50 bribe or one a $100 bribe? Then there are the practical issues, starting with how to measure conduct like bribery and embezzlement that cannot be directly observed and that the participants go to great lengths to hide (here).

Organized by the UNDP, the International Anticorruption Academy, UNODC, the OECD, and the World Bank, the conference did not produce the definitive guide to corruption measurement. Nor is such a guide even possible, given the definitional, conceptual, and practical issues corruption measurement poses.

What the conference did achieve was more important.

Participants from governments and NGOs from rich and poor countries alike agreed that the impossibility of an all-encompassing measurement tool must not be taken as a counsel of despair. There are many ways progress in the fight against corruption can be measured and much that national governments with input from academics and civil society can do to develop ever better measures of that progress.  The statement issued by this Second Global Conference on Harnessing Data to Improve Corruption Measurement along with the recommendations for advancing the measurement agenda is here.  

The Failure to Limit the Corruption of Global Capital

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This past April I was fortunate enough to attend a wide-ranging discussion at the Stanford Business School of what the growing power of global capital and the declining trust in government institutions means for the future of capitalism and democracy.

Not surprisingly corruption emerged as a major theme.

Speakers examined everything from the failure of multinational corporations to enforce their own ethics codes to the rise of a profession devoted to helping corrupt officials hide stolen assets to the OCED’s failure to crack down on Italy’s breach of the Antibribery Convention.

A link to the conference papers is here. My summary of what was said about the transnational spread of corruption and measures to curb it, published on the ProMarket page of the University of Chicago’s Stigler Center, is here.

An extraordinary app, NotebookLM, converted the summary into a dialogue explaining the summary and exploring its implications.  It is here.( A physicist friend had raved about how NotebookLM made his technical papers understandable to lay audiences. I didn’t believe him until I heard the dialogue it created off the summary. I am astonished at the result.) 

Civil Society Should Have a Role in Reviewing Compliance with UNCAC

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A critical if little noticed meeting on the fight against corruption took place in Vienna the first week in September (here). The Implementation Review Group of the Conference of States Parties to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, a committee of all 191 parties to the Convention with responsibility for ensuring each party complies with its terms, discussed proposals for strengthening enforcement.

The Convention is the single most important initiative ever taken to curb corruption. Each party pledges not only to make bribery, embezzlement, and other corrupt acts a crime under their domestic law but to actively enforce these laws. Full compliance by all state parties would turn corruption from a pressing national and international priority to a subject of mainly historical interest.

That corruption is not yet the province of historians is because responsibility for ensuring states fully comply with the Convention has been left to their governments. Initially, each government simply reported how well it was meeting its treaty obligations. The review mechanism was later enlarged to include a neighboring state and second from outside the region. The expanded review is a cooperative process with the reviewed government holding a veto over the reviewers’ conclusions.

The reviews produced some progress (here), often thanks to behind the scenes cajoling by the UNODC, which provides technical support to the reviews. It hardly needs saying, however, that leaving it to a government to judge whether it is vigorously combatting corruption means full compliance with UNCAC remains a chimera.

It is for this reason that the UNCAC Coalition, a global network of almost 400 civil society organizations in over 120 countries, has been laser focused on including citizens in the assessment process. Its latest effort: a statement from UN human rights experts it coordinated. Addressed to the Implementation Review Group, the experts urge UNCAC States Parties to protect and expand civic space in national and global anti-corruption fora and strengthen the inclusiveness and transparency of the UNCAC review mechanism.

The signatories, their statement, and additional information on the review mechanism are in this letter by UNCAC Coalition Managing Director Mathias Huter.

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