Category Archives: Commentary

What’s Corruption Got to Do With It? The Role of Anticorruption Rhetoric in Kolkata’s R.G. Kar Protests

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Doctors in in the Indian city of Kolkata have been protesting and striking against the state’s ruling political regime since August 2024, with no end to the demonstrations in sight. The protests were initially sparked by the brutal rape and murder of a junior doctor at R.G. Kar Medical Hospital, with anti-misogyny as the protesters’ central rallying cry. The “Reclaim the Night” march in Kolkata, which inspired parallel marches across India and garnered international attention, epitomized this early focus. In recent months, however, the protests have evolved into a broader movement against corruption. As one politician noted in his resignation letter, “the present outpouring of public anger is against this unchecked overbearing attitude of the corrupt.”

This might appear puzzling, as this anticorruption rhetoric seems rather disconnected from the movement’s original focus on justice for the victim and the broader culture of misogyny and violence against women. But there are at least three reasons why protests that originated in outrage over violence and misogyny have evolved into protests that foreground concerns about corruption.

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The Kerjiwal Case and the Erosion of Transparency and Accountability in India

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Former Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal rose to power championing anticorruption in Indian politics. But last March, India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED), a semi-independent agency tasked with enforcing anticorruption laws, arrested Kejriwal in connection with allegations that his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) received over $10 million in kickbacks in exchange for favorable liquor licenses in Delhi. This is not the first time that the AAP—a self-described anticorruption party—has been implicated in a corruption scandal (see here and here). Perhaps Kejriwal is yet another example of a politician caught betraying in private the principles he’d championed in public. 

But several observers have raised concerns about Kejriwal’s arrest, and suggested that it may reflect a disturbing politicization of anticorruption enforcement under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. For one thing, critics point to the suspicious timing of the arrest: Kejriwal was arrested just weeks before India’s national elections, following two years of investigation with no prior action. And Kejriwal’s arrest may have distracted public attention from a potential corruption scandal that would affect Modi’s party, the BJP, involving BJP fundraising from anonymous corporate donations through a system that the Indian Supreme Court recently declared unconstitutional. More generally, Kejriwal’s arrest fit a troubling pattern: Since 2014, 95% of the ED’s cases are against politicians from minority parties (under the previous regime, the number was 54%). Even more disturbing, 23 of the last 25 politicians probed for corruption saw charges dropped after switching allegiances to the BJP. And just a month prior to Kejriwal’s arrest, Hemant Soren, another popular Chief Minister critical of the BJP, was arrested on corruption charges.

So, is this a case where a hypocritical politician is being held accountable for betraying his own principles? Or is this an instance in which anticorruption enforcement has been weaponized by the incumbent president to discredit and punish political adversaries? Or both? How are citizens to know? Uncovering the truth is especially difficult when the three pillars meant to ensure transparency and accountability in Indian anticorruption efforts—the judiciary, the media, and civic organizations—appear increasingly susceptible to political and systemic pressures. When these institutions fail to inspire public confidence, the boundary between legitimate accountability and political retribution is obscured. Kejriwal’s case highlights the need to examine the state of these pillars and their ability to fulfill their critical roles in such contentious cases. 

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Italian Prosecutors’ Criminal Conviction For Not Disclosing Information in OPL-245 Bribery Case Called A Travesty of Justice

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“Questionable conjectures” and “illogical reasoning” produced a decision which “does not correspond to the reality or the nature of the crime.” That is how Italian legal scholar Nello Rossi explains the conviction of prosecutors Fabio de Pasquale and Sergio Spadaro for their failure to disclose information to Shell and ENI during the trial of the two for paying massive bribes to secure the rights to Nigerian oil tract OPL-245.

Writing in the January issue of a leading Italian law journal (original; translation), the former judge, Deputy Chief Prosecutor, and High Council of the Judiciary member excoriates the November 11 judgement by a trial court sitting in Brescia (here), showing it to be the result of an unprecedented, unrealistic reading of the governing law together with misstatements if not down-right misrepresentations of the facts.

In finding the prosecutors guilty of failing to perform an official act, the court ruled the law requires prosecutors to automatically turn over to defendants all material received from any third-party before or during trial no matter its credibility or relevance. That the two decided to secretly withhold the material, the court said, showed they knew withholding it was a crime. To buttress its decision, the court added that the material’s disclosure would have affected how the judges in the bribery case assessed the evidence.

Rossi’s meticulous analysis of the court’s decision eviscerates each of these contentions.

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Dreaming Small: Curtailing Prop Bets to Prevent Sports Corruption

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Globally, sports betting has become the “number one factor fueling corruption in sports.” Although the United States has not been as affected by this problem as other countries (at least in modern times), the recent widespread legalization of sports betting in America—accompanied by a surge in sports gambling, especially online—might change that. Thirty-eight U.S. states now permit sports betting, and six more are considering following suit. In 2023, Americans placed roughly $120 billion worth of bets with legal sportsbooks, a near $30 billion increase from 2022, and the percentage of Americans who bet on sports has grown to 39%, up from 19% in 2022. As sports gambling proliferates, so too does the risk of competition manipulation for monetary gain. A slate of recent scandals provides anecdotal evidence that this is indeed a serious problem. For example, in 2024, NBA player Jontay Porter was banned from the NBA for his involvement in a gambling scheme that included tipping off certain bettors that he would exit a game early and underperform sportsbooks’ expectations. In 2023, the University of Alabama head baseball coach was fired for providing information that Alabama would lose a certain game to a gambler who then bet on that outcome.

A comprehensive, or even global, solution to this problem would be ideal, but such a solution will likely take time to enact and implement. Regulators ought not wait. Instead, in the near term, state regulators can and should target a subset of the problem by restricting forms of betting that present an especially significant risk of competition manipulation. One area that deserves particular attention is the proliferation of “prop bets” on individual athletes at the collegiate level. Continue reading →

Artificial Intelligence in Anticorruption: Opportunities and Challenges

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Artificial intelligence (AI) tools, with their capacity to efficiently process and analyze vast amounts of data, have enormous potential to enhance anticorruption efforts. Traditional investigative methods, which often require extensive manual review of financial records, contracts, and communications, can be time-consuming and prone to human error. AI-powered systems, especially those driven by machine learning, can review large datasets to identify patterns and anomalies, flagging potentially corrupt activities more swiftly and accurately than human investigators. Some of the most promising applications of AI technology to anticorruption include:

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Italian Court: That ENI Bribed Nigerian Officials for Rights to OPL-245 Based on “Multiple Reliable Sources”

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A courageous Italian judge has affirmed that the evidence showing oil giant ENI paid massive bribes for rights to Nigerian oil block OPL-245 is reliable. Judge Francesca Giacomini ruled in December that ENIgate, a book reporting the bribery scheme, was based on “multiple reliable sources.”

In her opinion she not only dismissed ENI’s lawsuit that author Claudio Gatti and publisher Il Fatto (“the Fact”) had defamed the company by claiming it had paid bribes but ordered it to pay defendants’ legal fees as well.

Saying OPL-245 was secured through bribery isn’t what makes Judge Giacomini courageous. The bribery has been a matter of public record for over a decade (here).

The judge merits the accolade for having the fortitude to say so in the face of the fecklessness and likely downright corruption of her judicial colleagues (here). On even more evidence than she had before her, three of them exonerated ENI, its executives, and accomplices of all bribery charges with the flimsiest of reasoning (here). Even more scandalous, in a separate case a fourth found the prosecutors guilty of a crime for how they chose to present the case.

That case rests on an imagined set of facts and an unprecedented interpretation of Italian law (here). Is it too much to hope that the court hearing the appeal show the same courage as Judge Giacomini?

Time for English translation?

Key excerpts of Judge Giacomini’s ruling in English, courtesy of Google and Microsoft office translation programs, below.  Full text of decision here.

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The Anticorruption Legacy of American Civil Service Reform

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In the waning months of President Donald Trump’s first term, he issued an executive order that could have drastically reshaped the U.S. federal bureaucracy. The order created a new federal government job classification with far fewer civil service protections, called “Schedule F.” While most career civil servants in the U.S. federal government are protected from politically motivated firings and cannot be fired without cause, under Schedule F, employees “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” could be fired without following standard civil service procedures. With Trump now set to reassume power, Schedule F is back on the table, threatening to take away employment protections from potentially hundreds of thousands of federal employees and making it easier to fire civil servants for purely political reasons.

Commentators have pointed out the potential negative effects of Schedule F on administrative capacity, government performance, and accountability. But another key reason to be skeptical of Schedule F is that it represents a step backwards in the history of American civil service reform, which has its roots in 19th century anticorruption movements. Civil service independence and merit-based hiring came about in response to endemic corruption in the federal bureaucracy. The anticorruption history of the American civil service holds important lessons for modern civil service reformers, both in the United States and elsewhere.

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Breadwinner for Whom? Lessons from Nigeria’s Cassava Bread Initiative

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Nigeria is already the world’s largest producer of cassava, and the country is well positioned to be world’s largest cassava processor in the world, as well. If Nigeria could strengthen its capacity to produce, process, and utilize more cassava flour in its bread, it would save billions of dollars annually on wheat flour imports, create millions of jobs, and empower its farmers and agricultural sector. Yet when Nigeria has tried to achieve this goal—principally through a program called the Cassava Bread Initiative (CBI)—it has failed, and the principal reason for this failure is corruption.

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How State Prosecutors Can Fill the Gap in U.S. Anticorruption Enforcement

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It’s getting harder to prosecute federal corruption crimes in the United States. In a recent case called Snyder v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed the scope of a key anti-bribery law. And this decision is only the latest in a series of cases over the past decade that have limited the reach of federal prosecutors in going after state and local public corruption. While Congress could always enact legislation to expand the scope of federal anticorruption laws, significant legislative action seems unlikely anytime soon.

Given the increasing difficulty of corruption prosecution at the federal level, could state prosecutors step in to pursue cases now beyond the reach of federal law enforcement? After all, federal and state prosecutors share partly overlapping responsibilities for anticorruption enforcement in the United States. Although the Supreme Court has increasingly rejected broad theories of federal criminal liability especially in the context of state and local corruption, the Supreme Court’s narrow readings of federal anticorruption laws pose no barrier to cases brought by state prosecutors enforcing state law (see, for example, here and here). To be sure, federal prosecutors have traditionally played a substantial role in rooting out state and local government corruption, and many remain skeptical that state prosecutors can take up the anticorruption role that federal prosecutors have long played. Yet while state prosecutions might not be a perfect substitute for robust federal anticorruption enforcement, there are compelling reasons to think that state prosecutors could meaningfully fill the gap that the Supreme Court has opened up in the U.S. anticorruption system.

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Will America’s Anticorruption NGOs Hold Trump II to Account?

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If the trend Daniel Schuman identifies in “Open-Government Nonprofits Are Dying Off Just When They’re Needed Most,” the answer is a clear if frightening NO (here). Schuman, Executive Director of the American Governance Institute, ticks of a list of U.S. watchdogs closing their doors or drastically cutting staff thanks to multiple funding crises.

Those now on the block include: OpenSecrets, which for years has shown which politicians get money from what special interests; OMB Watch, a pioneer in unearthing hard-to-find data on government spending; and the Center for Public Integrity, the scourge of those officials who have never seen an ethical line they can’t cross.

Why, just when more eyes are needed on Trump and cronies, are those with 20-20 vision finding it so hard to raise money? Schulman puts it off to the polarization now infecting the American body politic. The foundations and high-net-worth individuals that have traditionally backed organizations dedicated to “public-informing, community-building work” have, he writes, become “auxiliaries for the parties in their trench warfare over political power.”

Bad enough the funding drought coincides with the return of an Administration likely to make Grant’s second term seem a model of probity. Many of those on the ropes have done much to advance the global war on corruption, from serving as models for citizens of other nations to providing critical technical assistance to anticorruption NGOs around the globe. The fight against corruption in the U.S. is entering a critical phase with the outcome likely to affect the fight in other nations. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Will donors please reconsider their decisions?

Thanks to TheBulwark, an indispensable source for what’s happening in the U.S., for publishing Schuman’s story.