Category Archives: Commentary

Heightened Transparency of Stock Trading by Public Officials Could Help Convey Reliable Information in Crises that the Public Deserves to Know

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On February 7, 2020, there were 34,876 confirmed cases of Covid-19 worldwide, but none in the United States. On that day, Fox News published a reassuring opinion piece co-authored by Republican Senator Richard Burr, arguing that the US is prepared to face any outbreak. Around February 13, a couple of days before the first confirmed cases in the US were discovered and before the stock markets began to plunge, Burr sold hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stocks, many of which were in the hotel industry. Senator Burr’s stock sale was not public at the time; the sales were first reported by ProPublica only a month later.

We do not yet know whether Senator Burr’s decision to dump his stocks was based on confidential government information to which he had special access. On the one hand, new information on the Covid-19 pandemic was coming out every day, and perhaps Senator Burr was simply one of many investors who changed their minds regarding the outbreak and were lucky to exit the market in time. On the other hand, Senator Burr is the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was receiving regular briefings on the coronavirus situation, so the suspicions towards him are understandable. (It also didn’t help matters that a few weeks after the publication of his op-ed Senator Burr told wealthy donors in a closed-door meeting that the Covid-19 outbreak “is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic,” but never revised his previous public reassurances.) Whether justifiably or not, Senator Burr was harshly criticized (including on this blog), with many calling for his resignation, and he has been sued for insider trading by a shareholder of one of the companies whose stocks he dumped. In addition to the criticism leveled at Senator Burr, several commentaries, including Cristina’s post on this blog, have argued that this incident demonstrates the need to amend the 2012 STOCK Act to impose stricter limitations on the freedom of senior US government officials, including Members of Congress, to trade in stocks.

My perspective is somewhat different. While I acknowledge the legitimate concerns that motivated calls to strengthen prohibitions on stock trading by government officials, in my view regulation should be more focused on ensuring the transparency of those trades, rather than on further limiting or blocking stock trading.

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Is the Vatican Finally Getting Serious About Cleaning Up Its Finances? The Appointment of an Antimafia Magistrate Is A Promising Sign

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Questions about Vatican finances have dogged the Church for decades. In 2012, leaked documents revealed allegations of extensive cronyism and money laundering; these documents suggested, for example, that the Church’s main charitable mission, Peter’s Pence, was being used to fund the lavish lifestyle of some members of the clergy. Though Pope Benedict XVI had attempted to institute financial auditing procedures, his efforts proved insufficient, and the scandal was widely seen as part of the reason for his controversial decision to resign the papacy. Unfortunately, the scandals have continued under Pope Francis. In 2015, the Church purchased a bankrupt Italian hospital in part with money borrowed illicitly from a publicly funded Italian hospital; the transaction, arranged off-the-books, was partly coordinated by a Swiss bank with a reputation for money laundering. In 2019, it was revealed that the Vatican had invested roughly $200 million, at least in part from Peter’s Pence, in luxury real estate in London. The purchase was partially financed through a since-discredited Swiss bank, and the loans were not properly recorded in the Vatican’s internal records. It was also revealed that the Vatican was investing millions of dollars through the Centurion Global Fund, which is connected to the same Swiss bank that ran the London purchase, as well as to a pair of banks that have been linked to a Venezuelan bribery and money-laundering scandal. While it is possible that some or all of these transactions may prove to have been the product of poor financial decision-making rather than corruption, these and other incidents have called into question the Church’s management of its finances as well as the integrity of its internal watchdog mechanisms

Pope Francis, who ascended to the papacy with promises of reform, has publicly acknowledged that there is corruption within Vatican finances and has pursued measures to restore confidence in the Church’s financial management. However, many of his attempts to institute more rigorous reforms have been frustrated by internal Vatican power struggles. For instance, in 2016 the powerful Archbishop Giovanni Becciu unilaterally stopped a scheduled audit of Vatican finances, and in 2017 the Vatican’s auditor-general was forced out of office, allegedly after finding evidence of financial irregularities. But in late 2019, Pope Francis stepped up his efforts to crack down on malfeasance and get the Vatican’s financial house in order. Francis took a particularly high-profile step in October 2019, when he appointed one of Italy’s leading antimafia magistrates, Giuseppe Pignatone (who retired from the Italian judiciary in May 2019), as head of the Vatican’s criminal tribunal, which is tasked with investigating corruption and fraud, among other crimes. Although some have portrayed Pignatone’s appointment as a sign of desperation by a Pope who cannot control his own bureaucracy, this choice was in fact a wise move by Francis to consolidate his reformist agenda. Pignatone’s former position as one of Italy’s most prestigious antimafia magistrates means that he is particularly well-placed to address Vatican corruption, for three reasons. Continue reading →

The Resignation of Brazilian Justice Minister Sérgio Moro: Reflections on How Key Players Should Handle This Political Crisis

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If a global pandemic and a mounting economic crisis weren’t enough, Brazil now faces a political crisis. Last Friday (April 24), Sérgio Moro, the former judge in the Car Wash anticorruption operation who had become Minister of Justice in the administration of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, resigned his ministerial post and accused President Bolsonaro of multiple improprieties having to do with apparent interference with ongoing federal criminal investigations. In particular, Moro stated that Bolsonaro fired the head of the Federal Police, Maurício Valexio, without Moro’s necessary approval (and, indeed, had forged Moro’s electronic signature on the dismissal papers), because—according to Moro—Bolsonaro “was concerned about investigations underway in the Federal Supreme Court,” which many interpreted as an allusion to ongoing investigations into corruption allegations against President Bolsonaro’s sons. This was not the first time President Bolsonaro had meddled in the  Ministry of Justice—notwithstanding his promise that Moro would have full autonomy—but the firing of Valexio seems to have been the final straw for Moro. In his resignation speech, Moro emphasized his reluctance to resign in the midst of a public health crisis, but declared that Bolsonaro’s actions were beyond the pale. “I could not,” Moro explained, “set aside my commitment to the rule of law.”

It’s hard to exaggerate the significance of Moro’s resignation for Brazilian politics, and for the future of Brazil’s fight against systemic corruption. The resignation of a senior minister on grounds of alleged presidential interference in an investigation would be an enormous scandal under any circumstances, but to appreciate the significance of Moro’s resignation from the Bolsonaro government, one must know a bit more about the larger context. Moro became a nationally prominent figure due to his role in presiding over some of the most high-profile investigations and trials in the Car Wash anticorruption investigation, including the trial of former President Lula of the left-wing Worker’s Party (the PT); the Car Wash investigation also led to the impeachment and removal of Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, though Judge Moro was not directly involved in that political process. Lula’s conviction meant that he was disqualified from running in the 2019 presidential election, which many observers believe he would have won. Thus, while Judge Moro was heralded as a hero by many Brazilian’s for his role in the Car Wash Operation, others—especially those affiliated with the PT—accused him of political bias against the left.

Lula’s disqualification, and the taint of corruption that attached to the PT due to the Car Wash Operation, created a window of opportunity for Jair Bolsonaro in the 2019 presidential election. Bolsonaro, a far-right politician who had long been considered a marginal figure at best, ran on an anticorruption platform, claiming that only he could clean up the corrupt Brazilian political system. This appeal worked: Many Brazilian voters who did not share Bolsonaro’s radical right-wing ideology nevertheless concluded that they couldn’t stomach another presidency with the “corrupt” PT. After Bolsonaro won the election, he appointed Moro to be his Minister of Justice—a move that many saw as intended to bolster Bolsonaro’s claims to be committed to ushering in a new era of anticorruption reform in Brazil. Bolsonaro made explicit and extravagant promises that Moro—an anticorruption hero in the eyes of most Brazilians, including many skeptical of Bolsonaro himself—would have a free hand to run his Ministry without presidential interference. But Moro’s acceptance of a senior position in the Bolsonaro administration drew criticism from the Brazilian left, a line of criticism that only intensified after a series of media stories last summer that suggested, based on leaked text messages, that while Moro was the presiding Judge in the Car Wash cases he may have inappropriately coordinated with prosecutors or exhibited bias against Lula. While some disputed this interpretation of the text messages, they fed into the narrative that Moro was partisan and Car Wash was a witch hunt. Even some of Moro’s supporters expressed concern about the content of the leaks, and about his acceptance of a position in the Bolsonaro government.

Moro’s resignation is a shocking new twist to this ongoing drama. Until recently, he was condemned by the far-left as Lula’s jailer; now he’s condemned by the far-right as a traitor. With some Brazilians, he’s still a popular anticorruption standard-bearer. It’s understandable that there’s considerable speculation both about Moro’s future and about the immediate ramifications of his dramatic resignation for the Bolsonaro government. There are questions about the longer-term impact of these developments on Brazilian politics and the future of anticorruption reform.

How should the various actors in this drama handle the situation going forward? In the remainder of this post, I advance some tentative advice for three principal players—the Brazilian Congress, the investigative agencies (especially the Federal Police), and Moro himself. How these players handle this volatile situation over the coming weeks and months will have far-reaching implications for Brazilian politics and institutions.

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The Murky Business of Asset Recovery for Hire UPDATE

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Premium Times and Finance Uncovered offered yesterday a glimpse of the lucrative business of asset recovery for hire.  A story posted on the websites of both the Nigerian paper and the London NGO (here and here) reports that the Nigerian government has hired Johnson & Johnson, a small Lagos-based law firm, to recover as much as several hundred of millions of dollars stolen from it through corrupt oil deals.  In return the firm will be paid five percent of whatever is recovered.  Johnson & Johnson, which apparently “won” the contract through an unsolicited proposal, has partnered with an investor who will pick up the firm’s cost to recover the money in return for a 300 percent return on its investment.  UPDATE: The Premium Times reports a coalition of civil society groups has asked Nigeria’s justice minister, Abubakar Malami, to release details of the agreement with Johnson & Johnson.

The Johnson & Johnson deal is not the first time the Nigerian government has turned to a private firm to recover stolen assets.  To recoup what General Sani Abacha stole while head of state in the nineteen nineties, it hired Geneva lawyer Enrico Monfrini. His take of the recovery was only four percent, not Johnson & Johnson’s five, but he still came out rather well.  For the 3,000 hours per year he told Swiss journalist Sylvain Besson he and his colleagues put in to recover $600 million of Abacha funds, which works out to roughly one lawyer working full-time and one-half time each year, his firm was paid $24 million (4% x $600 million).

Ever since UNCAC put the recovery of stolen assets on the international agenda, private contractors have been lining up to help developing country governments recover assets.  While there have been some successes, they have, as the Abacha case shows, come at a very high price.  Are they worth what the governments are being charged?  Are there better, cheaper alternatives? Continue reading →

The U.S. Should Enact the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act

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As I have previously discussed on this blog, corruption is sports is a serious and systemic issue. I recommended that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) ban Russia from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and WADA did indeed decide to ban Russia from global sports for four years in the aftermath of Russia’s years-long state-sponsored doping program. The 2020 Olympics was postponed due to the coronavirus, and other major sports events will not be taking place for the foreseeable future, but once it is safe to hold these events again—indeed, before then—the work to combat corruption in sports must continue. Russia appealed WADA’s decision, and thus far the ban is the only consequence facing Russia and the state officials who engineered the doping program. It is unclear whether the ban will be enough for Russia to learn its lesson, or enough to deter other countries from trying to get away with similar ploys.

Fortunately, the United States has the opportunity to become a leader in fighting this kind of corruption in sports. Last fall, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act of 2019, named for Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the whistleblower who revealed the Russian state-sponsored doping scheme and who has been the target of Russian retaliation ever since. This bill would make it a crime for “any person, other than an athlete, to knowingly carry into effect, attempt to carry into effect, or conspire with any other person to carry into effect a scheme in commerce to influence by use of a prohibited substance or prohibited method any major international sports competition” in which U.S. athletes compete; the bill also permits U.S. citizens to pursue monetary compensation for deceptive competition and provides protections for whistleblowers. The bill, now pending in the U.S. Senate, has received bipartisan support, as well as the endorsement of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

WADA, on the other hand, has raised concerns about the bill, especially the proposed law’s allegedly impermissible extraterritorial reach. This objection is unpersuasive, for several reasons:

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The Trilateral Nigeria-US-Jersey Agreement to Return Nigerian Dictator Abacha’s Assets: A Preliminary Assessment

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This past February, the United States signed a trilateral agreement with Nigeria and the British dependency of Jersey to repatriate to Nigeria $308 million in funds that the late General Sani Abacha had stolen from the Nigerian government during his time as Head of State from 1993-1998. This enormous sum was a mere fraction of the estimated $2-5 billion that Abacha had laundered through the global banking system. Back in 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a civil forfeiture complaint against more than $625 million that could be traced as proceeds from Abacha’s corruption. Shortly afterwards, in 2014, a U.S. federal court entered a forfeiture judgment against over $500 million of these assets, including the $308 million held in Jersey bank accounts. Appeals of the forfeiture judgment in the United States were finally exhausted in 2018, at which point the United States, Jersey, and Nigeria entered into negotiations to repatriate the recovered assets. The February 2020 trilateral agreement represents the culmination of those negotiations.

Back in 2014, when DOJ first froze Abacha’s assets, Raj Banerjee asked on this blog an important question, one that has come up in several other asset recovery cases too: Who will get Abacha’s assets? Would the United States simply give the money back to the Nigerian government? Or would the United States, out of concerns that the repatriated assets would be stolen again, insist on attaching conditions to the returned funds, or even create or empower a non-governmental nonprofit entity to allocate the funds (as the United States has done in some other cases)? Now, six years later, we finally have an answer. Under the terms of the trilateral agreement, the repatriated funds will be used to help finance three infrastructure projects that had already been approved by the Nigerian legislature and President Muhammadu Buhari: the construction of the Second Niger Bridge, the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, and the Abuja-Kano road. These projects aim to better connect people and supply chains in Nigeria’s impoverished Eastern and Northern regions to the developed Western region. Additionally, the agreement declares that the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) will oversee the funds, that a yet-to-be-determined independent auditor will conduct a financial review, and that a yet-to-be-determined independent civil society organization with expertise in engineering, among other areas, will have a monitoring role.

There is much to admire about the agreement. Using these assets to fund critical infrastructure projects that Nigeria’s legislative and executive branches had already approved demonstrates a respect for Nigerian sovereignty and democratic institutions, while at the same time directing the money to projects that would tangibly benefit the Nigerian people, particularly in some of the country’s poorest areas—the people who were most victimized by Abacha’s looting of the national treasury. Yet while the governments of the United States, Nigeria, and Jersey all heralded the trilateral agreement has a landmark, some voices, particularly in the United States, have expressed skepticism. Most notably, U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley sent a letter to DOJ questioning whether the returned funds will truly be protected from misuse. Senator Grassley suggested that senior officials in the Buhari Administration, including the Attorney General, could not be trusted to ensure that the Nigerian government would face consequences if it misappropriated the returned funds, and he questioned why DOJ would return the money without “proper safeguards” to prevent misuse a second time. Unsurprisingly, Nigeria took issue with Grassley’s accusations. But his concerns have some merit.

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How to Make the Iraqi Commission of Integrity More Effective in Fighting High-Level Corruption

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Last fall, anti-government protests broke out in Iraq. The protests started in Baghdad before spreading to other cities from Najaf to Nassiriya, rocking the country through the beginning of this year. High on the list the protestors’ demands: rooting out pervasive government corruption. The protestors are more than justified in making this demand. Systemic embezzlement, kickbacks, and bribery schemes pollute Iraqi politics and government services, and seemingly little has been done to get the problem under control.

Iraq’s chief anticorruption body is an entity called the Federal Commission of Integrity (CoI), an independent commission originally created in 2004, and recognized under Article 102 of the 2005 Iraqi Constitution as an independent body subject to monitoring by the Iraqi Parliament. CoI is tasked with investigating corruption cases, recovering stolen government assets, proposing anticorruption legislation, and overseeing mandatory financial disclosures for Iraqi government officials. With respect to its investigative functions, CoI has a mixed track record. On the one hand, despite the extraordinarily challenging environment in which it operates, CoI has achieved some successes. For example, last November a CoI investigation led to the arraignment of a Member of Parliament, Ahmed al-Jubouri, on  corruption charges for misappropriating government funds. A month later, in December 2019, a previous CoI investigation into former MP Shadha al-Abousy culminated in her conviction. More generally, official statistics indicate that in 2017, CoI handled 8,537 criminal cases, and of the 1,221 cases completed that year, 753 resulted in convictions—including seven convictions of ministerial-level government officials. The 2018 data reveal 1,218 convictions, including four ministerial-level officials. (Official 2019 statistics are not, to my knowledge, available yet.)

On the other hand, CoI has had difficulty securing the convictions of powerful, influential figures. For example, only days after Ahmed al-Jubouri’s arrest, he was released following the intervention of Iraq’s Parliament Speaker, Mohammed Halbusi. Furthermore, of the high-level convictions CoI has achieved, most have been handed down in absentia, with defendants remaining at large. And CoI has had limited success recovering stolen public funds. Statistics for the first quarter of 2018 reveal that CoI had recovered $131.8 million in stolen funds. In all of 2017, $111.7 million previously lost to corruption made it back into government coffers. That may seem like a lot, but keep in mind that in 2019 alone, CoI estimated that $15.6 billion of Iraqi state funds had been lost to corruption. Since 2003, estimates put total state funds lost to corruption at upwards of $300 billion. So CoI’s recovery efforts have barely made a dent in the amount of money embezzled. Moreover, most of the cases handled by CoI that involved stolen funds have been against relatively low-level government employees.

So, while COI has brought thousands of corruption cases to courts and secured hundreds of low-level convictions, it has been less successful in tackling high-level corruption. But this is no reason to give up on the commission. A few key changes could make CoI a much more effective anticorruption body.

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Corruption Risks in Infrastructure Projects Using Design-Build Contracts

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For over a decade, state and local governments in the United States have been moving to streamline the procurement of roads, bridges, and other public works.  Traditionally, they contracted with one firm to design the project, and then, through competitive bidding, let a contract to a second firm to build it. For many projects, public authorities are now replacing this design-bid-build method of contracting with the design-build method of contracting.  One contract is awarded, competitively, to a single firm both to design and to build the facility.

Design-build contracts offer several advantages over a design-bid-build contract.  Three are most important for public procurements. One, accountability is centralized. Whereas if a problem arises during construction of a design-bid-build project, the builder can claim the fault lies not with it but with the firm that designed the project, there is no one else to blame in a design-build contract.  Two, design-build contracts are usually fixed-price, meaning the price is set before work begins.  With a design-bid-build contract, the cost varies both with the amount of materials used and as a result of problems arising during construction.  Finally, design-build projects take less time to complete.  With design-bid-build, no work begins until after the design is finished.  With design-build, preliminary construction work – clearing the site, levelling the terrain – can begin while the project is being designed.

These advantages have not been lost on less developed nations and donor organizations.  The number and size of public infrastructure projects the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the other development banks are financing that use design-build are on the rise.  According to its 2018 Annual Review of Procurement Activities, the largest contract the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development funded in 2017 was a € 274 million design-build contract for an ore enrichment project in Kazakhstan.

But donors and developing countries should not ignore the major disadvantage of design-build contracts compared to design-bid-build contracts: corruption.  Blame for what many consider the most egregious public corruption scandal in American history has been attributed to the abuses that arose from a design-build contract, and indeed, corruption concerns spurred the United States to replace design-build contracts for public works with the more transparent contracting method today known as design-bid-build. Continue reading →

Checking the Spread of Criminal Corruption Is Necessary to Protect Italian Democracy

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Author’s Note: The following piece was originally drafted back in February, before the massive coronavirus outbreak in Italy. The post was supposed to have been published in early March, but I put it on hold, because I was unsure whether it would be appropriate to publish a piece on criminal corruption in Italy at a time when Italian society has been so devastated by this public health crisis. After considering the issue, I decided to post this piece, in part because it deals with issues that have plagued Italian society in the run-up to the coronavirus outbreak, and that could prove to have significant implications for the handling of coronavirus. In particular, criminal corruption has been linked to the development of inadequate infrastructure, which threatens to have serious consequences in the face of a major public health crisis. To be clear, I have not yet seen any evidence that corruption has played a major role in Italy’s handling of the coronoavirus epidemic. While such evidence might emerge in the future, neither this introductory note or the post that follows should be construed as arguing that corruption is responsible for Italy’s current situation. I encourage all readers of this blog to keep the people of Italy in their hearts as they continue to combat the threat of coronavirus.

Last December, in an operation called Rinascita-Scott, Italian police arrested over 300 suspected members and associates of the ‘Ndrangheta, a mafia-type network based out of the Calabria region. These arrests spanned twelve Italian regions, and were coordinated with arrests in Switzerland, Germany, and Bulgaria. Among the accused were a large number of corrupt public officials—demonstrating the depth of the ‘Ndrangheta’s ties to the Italian political world. For example, Gianluca Callipo, the mayor of the town of Pizzo Calabro and president of the Calabrian branch of the National Association of Italian Municipalities, is accused of leveraging his position to secure provisions favorable to the ‘Ndrangheta’s interests, or to prevent the adoption of measures harmful to those interests, in exchange for electoral support. Similarly, Nicola Adamo, the former regional assessor of Calabria, is under investigation for influence trafficking as a result of his involvement in diverting funds to ‘Ndrangheta affiliates in exchange for votes. And these are not isolated cases. Previous operations in 2019, in the provinces of Val d’Aosta and Emilia Romagna, led to the arrest of several ‘Ndrangheta-connected city counselors, including city council president Giuseppe Caruso, who is accused of using his position in the Customs Agency to fraudulently divert EU funds to members of the ‘Ndrangheta. These operations have demonstrated that the ‘Ndrangheta, which was long considered a somewhat localized Calabrian organization, has entrenched itself in Italian politics, not only penetrating municipal governments throughout Italy and across party lines, but even extending its influence to national politics.

The rise of the ‘Ndrangheta highlights mafias groups’ ongoing ability to corrupt politicians, as well as the importance of developing a national strategy to combat this corruption. The exchange of votes for money and influence trafficking distorts Italian democracy and jeopardizes the provision of public goods to which the Italian people are entitled; moreover, mafia-affiliated businesses that benefit from corrupt public procurement often produce subpar goods that put public safety at risk. And while the successes of Rinascita-Scott and other operations highlights the professionalism and effectiveness of Italy’s antimafia legal institutions—particularly the investigators and prosecutors who specialize in mafia cases—checking the spread of this group will require a multifaceted approach. Both the government entities responsible for regulating elections and the political parties themselves have an important role to play, and could to more to address this clear and present danger to Italian democracy. Continue reading →

The Continuing Controversy Over the Destination of the Petrobras Penalties: The Coronavirus Crisis Has Ended One Debate, But May Start Another

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As most readers of this blog are likely aware, the Brazilian state-owned oil company Petrobras has been at the center of a massive bribery scandal in Brazil, and the main focus of Brazil’s so-called Car Wash (Lava Jato) Operation. That Operation uncovered evidence that between 2006 and 2014, corporations paid kickbacks to senior Petrobras officials for inflated contracts, and the Petrobras officials funneled a substantial portion of those illicit proceeds to the political parties in the government’s coalition. These revelations lead to legal actions not only in Brazil, but also in the United States. Because Petrobras issued securities in the U.S., and because U.S. law imposes criminal liability on a corporation for the conduct of the corporation’s employees, Petrobras was potentially liable under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), because Petrobras officers had facilitated corruption abroad (that is, in Brazil). In September 2018,Petrobras signed a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) with the United States Department of Justice, according to which the company would pay over US$850 million in penalties. But, crucially, only 20% of that penalty would be paid to the United States; the remaining 80%, according to the terms of the NPA, was to be paid by Petrobras “to Brazil.”

This provision sparked great controversy and debate in Brazil over the destination of that money—a debate that seems to have been ended (for now) by the coronavirus crisis. The root of the problem is that under Brazilian law, Petrobras (the corporate entity) was considered victim of the bribery scheme, not a perpetrator. So, from a Brazilian perspective, it was hard to comprehend why the company should be obligated to pay for crimes that harmed it. Indeed, in many of the Car Wash cases resolved in Brazil, penalties recovered from other entities (such as the firms that paid kickbacks) were transferred to Petrobras. But under the NPA with U.S. authorities, Petrobras was required to pay over US$650 million to Brazil. What Brazilian entity or entities should get that money? And who should decide on the allocation?

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