Category Archives: Commentary

Corruption in Mexico under AMLO: Lessons from an Interview With Dr. Jose Ivan Rodriguez-Sanchez

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In July 2018, Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) won the Mexican presidential election in a landslide. AMLO campaigned on the promise to transform Mexican society, and his pledge to curb corruption was among the most prominent planks of his platform. Yet although AMLO remains very popular with the Mexican public (his approval rating at his 100-day mark in March 2019 was above 80% in some polls), many Mexican anticorruption experts are less enthusiastic.

I’ve offered my own reasons for skepticism about AMLO’s approach to fighting corruption in prior posts (see here and here), but to try to better understand some of the reasons why Mexican anticorruption specialists are critical of the AMLO administration, I interviewed one of those specialists, Dr. Jose Ivan Rodriguez-Sanchez, a Mexican scholar currently based at the Mexico Center at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. Dr. Rodriguez-Sanchez, whose recent publications include Measuring Mexico’s Corruption and Corruption in Mexico, shared his view of the biggest concerns regarding the AMLO administration’s approach to corruption. What follows is my translation from our conversation (which took place in Spanish), with some paraphrasing and condensation for clarity.

Dr. Rodriguez-Sanchez highlighted five criticisms of the AMLO administration’s anticorruption policies: Continue reading →

Providing Reparations to the Victims of Foreign Bribery: What Criteria Are Appropriate?

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It is widely agreed that foreign bribery is capable of causing harm to a range of different victims, including the governments whose officials are bribed (the so-called “demand-side countries”), and the citizens of those countries. Yet traditionally, when supply-side countries (those with jurisdiction over the firms that paid bribes abroad) reach settlement agreements with corporate defendants in these cases, the fines and penalties collected—which can sometimes run into the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars—go to the supply-side government treasuries, a fact that has attracted considerable discussion and criticism.

In recent years, we’ve started to see some changes in the approach taken by supply-side governments on this issue, with the United Kingdom being particularly active. On several notable occasions, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has included in its settlement agreements with corporate defendants specific provisions to remediate the victims of foreign bribery. Importantly, such remediation (not just in the UK case, but more generally) can take two forms, which are often unhelpfully conflated:

  • In some cases, the resolution of a bribery case may include compensation to identifiable victims, if it can be shown that the victims suffered a direct loss, the value of which can be reasonably estimated. The victim might be a foreign government itself. For example, the 2015 deferred prosecution agreement negotiated between the SFO and Standard Bank included a payment to the Tanzanian Government, because in that case an agent of Standard Bank had used money to which the Tanzanian government was entitled in order to pay an illegal bribe. The payment to the Tanzanian government in the settlement agreement was compensation for this loss.
  • In many cases, though, the harm done by foreign corruption is more diffuse, the victims are difficult to identify individually, and the monetary value of the harm inflicted is impossible to calculate. Nonetheless, even though traditional victim compensation is not possible in these cases, it is still possible, and often desirable, for a portion of the fines and penalties collected from the responsible corporation to be directed toward improving the lives and livelihoods of the population victimized by the misconduct—perhaps by making a payment to the government of the demand-side country, possibly earmarked for a specific purpose, or perhaps by donating money to charities, or by purchasing assets that benefit the public, or even by making payments directly to citizens. Though these sorts of payments are also sometimes described as “victim compensation,” I prefer the term reparations, which makes clear that these payments are not “compensation” in the traditional, narrower sense, but rather payments intended for the benefit of a general populace or society at large. An example of this sort of reparations payment can be found in another case involving the SFO and Tanzania, this one the SFO’s 2010 settlement agreement with BAE Systems for illegal commissions that the company had paid to an intermediary in connection with the sale of an aircraft radar system to the Tanzanian government. (Technically, BAE admitted and was penalized for an accounting offense—failing to keep accurate records of the payments—rather than the underlying bribery.) The settlement required BAE systems to pay approximately £30 million for the purpose of buying educational materials in Tanzania. There is no evidence to suggest that BAE System’s misconduct in connection with the radar system sale caused any damage, let alone £30 million worth of damage, to Tanzania’s education system. So this payment was not “victim compensation” in the narrow sense, but rather an effort to offset some of the damage BAE’s wrongful conduct had done at a more general, societal level.

The legal mechanisms for determining compensation awards, though imperfect, are relatively straightforward. Determining an award of reparations is much more complicated, because (almost by definition) it will not be clear exactly who suffered due to the act of foreign bribery, nor how much loss was suffered, nor how that loss should be recouped. (While the United Kingdom does have “compensation principles” in place which are intended to provide a guiding framework for remedial awards in foreign bribery cases, these principles are phrased at too high a level of abstraction to be much use.) One question that will need to be addressed, and the one I want to focus on here, is whether there must be some kind of nexus between the harm caused by a particular act of bribery and the proposed reparations. Of course, as I have explained, reparations are distinct from compensation, and will not require a showing of a quantifiable harm to an identifiable victim. But does the reparations payment need to have any strong connection—in sector, location, or amount—with the harm plausibly caused by the defendant’s act of bribery? Continue reading →

The Australian Government Shows Us How Not To Create an Anticorruption Agency

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Two recent polls of the Australian public make two things quite clear: the Australian people have little trust in their federal politicians, and they want a federal anticorruption agency to investigate misuse of public office. This is perhaps not surprising given the string of scandals that have come to light in the past few years (see, for example, here, here, and here). And ordinary citizens are not alone: a survey of government workers found that thousands believed they had witnessed acts of corrupt behavior, particularly cronyism and nepotism. And a group of 34 former Australian Judges, including a former Chief Justice of the High Court, have published an open letter to Prime Minister Scott Morrison stating that Australian trust in federal politics is at an all-time low due to perceptions of corruption, and that a federal anticorruption agency is the necessary response. 

It is therefore unsurprising that the proposed creation of a federal anticorruption agency has emerged as a salient issue in the upcoming federal elections, to be held on May 18 (one week from tomorrow). The Morrison government initially dismissed the idea, but in December 2018 changed its tune and announced that, if the Liberal Party (Morrison’s party) wins the election, the government would create a Commonwealth Integrity Commission with two separate divisions: a law enforcement integrity division and a public sector integrity division. The former would have the power to investigate police officers and other law enforcement personnel, while the latter would have the power to investigate politicians.

Unfortunately, while a federal anticorruption agency is an idea whose time has come, the Morrison government’s proposal suffers from four key shortcomings: Continue reading →

The Limited Effect of Corruption Allegations on Voters: A Brief Analysis of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Reelection

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Last fall, Professor Stephenson alluded to the confusion that many in the anticorruption community feel regarding “voters in many democracies [who] seem to support candidates that are known or reputed to be corrupt.” This confusion was shared by many of my (non-Israeli) colleagues over the last few weeks, upon learning that Benjamin Netanyahu won the April 2019 elections and will serve as Israel’s Prime Minister for a fourth consecutive term (and fifth term overall), despite being suspected of various corruption offenses, including bribery and breach of trust (see here, here, here, and here). (Saying that Netanyahu won the elections is slightly inaccurate in a technical sense, since in Israel voters do not vote directly for the candidate they wish to serve as Prime Minister, but rather for the party they wish to represent them in the parliament (the Knesset). Nonetheless, 26.46% of the voters supported Netanyahu’s Likud party, making it one of the two largest parties in the Knesset; many other voters supported various other right-wing parties that were sure to join Likud to form a government.) Does the fact that so many Israelis cast their ballot in favor of Netanyahu’s party, or other parties sure to back Netanyahu for Prime Minister, mean that Israeli voters simply do not care about corruption?

The short answer is no. The longer answer is that there are three main reasons why voters may have chosen to support Likud despite disapproving of corruption:

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A Plan To Share FCPA Penalties with Brazil has Been Thwarted… by Brazil: The Supreme Court’s Invalidation of the Lava Jato Foundation

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A frequent criticism of how the US Department of Justice (DOJ) enforces the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) is that the fines recovered typically go to the US Treasury, rather than being used to make reparations for the damages caused by corruption in the countries where the bribery took place. Those who hold that view were likely encouraged by the non-prosecution agreement (NPA) that the DOJ concluded with Petrobras, the Brazilian state-owned oil company, in September 2018. The US enforcement action against Petrobras is a development of the so-called Lava Jato (Car Wash) investigation, in which firms paid off some Petrobras’ senior employees to benefit them in the contracts they had with the oil company. Such senior employees also shared a portion of the briber of politicians and political parties. In Brazil, Petrobras (and its shareholders, including the Brazilian federal government) are considered the victims of this scheme, but the US DOJ considered Petrobras a perpetrator (as well as a victim), because Petrobras officials had facilitated the bribe payments, in violation of the FCPA. Thus, the DOJ brought an enforcement action against Petrobras, and the parties settled via an NPA that required Petrobras to pay over US$852 million in penalties for FCPA violations. But—and here is the interesting part—the NPA also stated that the US government would credit against this judgment 80% of the total (over US$682 million) that Petrobras would pay to Brazilian authorities pursuant to an agreement to be negotiated subsequently between Petrobras and the Brazilian authorities.

This unusual agreement was the result of unusually close cooperation between U.S. and Brazilian authorities, especially the Lava Jato Task Force (group of federal prosecutors handling a series of Petrobras-related cases). After the conclusion of the NPA between the DOJ and Petrobras, the Task Force then entered into negotiations with Petrobras and reached an agreement under which Petrobras would use US$682 million that it would otherwise owe to the US government to create a private charity, known unofficially as the Lava Jato Foundation, with the Foundation using half of the money to sponsor public interest initiatives, and the other half to compensate minority shareholders in Petrobras. According to the agreement, the Foundation would be governed by a committee of five unpaid members from civil society organizations, to be appointed by the Task Force upon judicial confirmation. Once created, the Task Forcewould have the prerogative to have one of its members sitting at the Foundation’s board.

This resolution of the Petrobras case seemed to be a win-win resolution and a promising precedent for future cases: The US imposed a hefty sanction for violation of US law, but most of the money would be used to help the Brazilian people, who are arguably the ones most harmed by Petrobras’s unlawful conduct. Yet this arrangement has proven extremely controversial in Brazil, both politically and legally. Indeed, the issue has divided the country’s own federal prosecutors: The Prosecutor General (the head of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, from which the Lava Jato Task Force enjoys a broad independence) challenged the creation of the Foundation as unconstitutional. She prevailed on that challenge in Brazil’s Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federalor STF), which suspended the operation of the Foundation.

What, exactly, was the legal argument against the creation of the Lava Jato Foundation, and what are the implications of the STF’s ruling for this approach to remediating the impacts of foreign bribery going forward?

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The Dark Side of Righteous Anger: Talking about Corruption After Alan García’s Suicide

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Two weeks ago, former Peruvian President Alan García shot himself when authorities came to arrest him on corruption charges. Garcia’s suicide provoked a diverse range of reactions. Among these, one of the most disturbing was a vulgar tweet from Major Olimpio, a right-wing Brazilian politician who tweeted: “The ex-President of Peru committed suicide upon being arrested. Hopefully this trend catches on here in Brazil. It would big a big savings for the country.” Olimpio, of course, is referring to the dozens of politicians in Brazil implicated in the Car Wash (Lava Jato) scandal.

Olimpio’s tweet taps into the white-hot anger and resentment that continues to sweep across Latin America in response to the revelations of high-level corruption throughout the region. That anger is understandable. Investigations growing out of the Lava Jato operation—particularly those involving the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, which has admitted to paying more than $800 million in bribes across 11 countries in Latin America—have exposed pervasive corruption reaching the highest levels of government. Ten former Latin American presidents (including García) have been or are currently being investigated for corruption, along with dozens of other high level officials in multiple countries, and possibly hundreds of rank-and-file officers who were a part of these schemes. But while popular fury over corruption is justified, it should never be okay to mock suicide or make implicit death threats. And while Olimpio’s tweet about García is a particularly extreme case, this sort of hostile, callous, violent rhetoric is becoming disturbingly common in the public dialogue about corruption and its perpetrators in Latin America. For example, the current President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, and his son both tweeted menacing threats to Bolsonaro’s opponent, Fernando Haddad, during the campaign saying that he was “nursing on the teat of corrupt politicians in jail” because he had visited a jailed politician, and that it was “good that he already knew what it was like to go to prison.” Since Brazil is still a country where you are innocent until proven guilty, and Haddad himself had not even been accused with corruption offenses (though several of his political allies had been), these comments were deeply disturbing.

This needs to stop. The anger over corruption is understandable, and to a certain degree a healthy development, given that for so long grudging or cynical resignation was the norm. But rather than channel this anger into violent threats, everyone—especially those in positions of power—needs to temper their anger with more civility. There is a wrong way and a right way to talk about corruption. Crude violent rhetoric is the wrong way.

So what’s the right way? Let me suggest two more appropriate ways to harness the fury over corruption and channel it in a more productive direction.

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Mozambicans To Credit Suisse: Make Good on Crooked Debt

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Credit Suisse’s complicity in the $2.4 billion corruptly lent to the Mozambican government dampened festivities at its April 26 annual shareholders’ meeting.  While shareholders celebrated receipt of a fat dividend, a representative from Mozambique reminded them that some of this money comes at the expense of the citizens of Mozambique – 28 million persons, most desperately poor, saddled with repaying loans foisted off on their government through corruption.  Three senior Credit Suisse employees have been indicted for their role in the scheme, one Credit Suisse management (rewarded with a hefty pay hike at the meeting) claims cleverly circumvented its controls preventing unlawful deals.

The statement to shareholders, delivered by a representative of the civil society organization Fórum de Monitoria do Orçamento (FMO, budget monitoring forum in English), asks Credit Suisse to support restorative justice to atone for its role in the Mozambican debt crisis.  To this end, Credit Suisse is asked to: i) accept accountability for its actions in the debt issue;  ii) commit to return to Mozambique all proceeds from the Mozambican Illegal debt scandal; iii) collaborate with authorities to ensure that all responsible parties are held accountable for their roles in the scandal; iv) write off outstanding debt arising out of debt crisis; and v) help ensure the people of Mozambique do not have to make good on debts they had no part in incurring and which did nothing to benefit them.

Full text below; video here (at 2:18:50 –  2:28).

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The Economic Benefits of Golden Visa and Golden Passport Programs: A Response to Professor Stephenson

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In the past few months, there has been a healthy debate on this blog about “golden visa” and “golden passport” (GV/GP) programs, following reports by Transparency International-Global Witness and the European Commission on the corruption risk associated with these programs. In his post a few weeks ago, Professor Stephenson goes even further, contending that such programs carry no economic benefit and should therefore be abolished. I respectfully disagree. Even taking the status quo as is, the $28 billion these programs have brought in over the past decade make them a savvy tool for nations seeking to attract investment. All GV/GP programs are not equal, and there are vast differences in the transparency and potential for abuse across countries. Reforming GV/GP programs with high degrees of risk, as discussed previously on this blog, is a better answer than abolishing them, since the concerns raised are straightforward and addressable.

Professor Stephenson’s post focused only on the economic aspect of GV/GP programs, so my response will do the same, but it is worth noting that a lot of the criticism of these programs comes from the ethical questions they raise over whether one should have the “right to buy citizenship.” Though this objection is not my main focus here, I can’t help but point out the irony of worrying about the unfairness of a system that allows the wealthy to buy citizenship against the background of a system that confers the privileges of citizenship simply by an accident of birth, and in which immigration systems are so badly broken that, for example, immigrants to the US face a 150 year-long waiting time for a green cardthrough routine channels. But my main focus here is on Professor Stephenson’s argument that GV/GP programs lack a sufficient economicbenefit to justify the corruption risk, and on this question, I believe he is mistaken. 

Let’s start with some top-line numbers: The sale of EU passports accounted for as much as 5.2% of Cyprus’s GDP in 2017. Portugal’s scheme has delivered close to €4 billion to the economy. Malta enjoys a budget surplus because of its growing trade in residency and citizenship. Over in the Caribbean, income from GV/GP programs has contributed up to 25% of the GDP, and even the majority of government revenue. The outsized impact of these programs is hard to deny. Professor Stephenson does not contest the accuracy of these or similar statistics, but he denies their significance for several reasons, each of which is flawed:

Continue reading →

Presidential Power Grab: Corruption and Democratic Backsliding in Mongolia

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Mongolian democracy is in trouble. On March 26, President Khaltmaa Battulga proposed emergency legislation that would grant the presidency unprecedented powers to dismiss members of the judiciary, the prosecutor general, and the head of the state anticorruption agency (the Independent Authority Against Corruption, or IAAC). One day later, parliament approved this legislation by a vote of 34-6 (with 36 members of parliament either absent or abstaining), despite the fact that President Battulga hails from the Democratic Party (DP) while the rival Mongolian People’s Party (MPP) controls parliament. Technically the law doesn’t grant the dismissal powers directly to the president, but rather to a three-member National Security Council (NSC) composed of the president, prime minister, and speaker of parliament, and an oversight body called the Judicial General Council. But President Battulga dominates the NSC and personally appoints the members of the Judicial General Council, giving him effective authority to remove Mongolia’s judges and chief law enforcement officials at will. Sure enough, promptly after the law was passed, Battulga dismissed the head of the IAAC, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the prosecutor general.

This new legislation, a crippling blow to Mongolian democracy, has its origins in corruption, and corruption is likely to be its effect. President Battulga induced parliament to grant him such extraordinary powers by claiming that he alone can really take on Mongolia’s severe corruption problem. In his statement to parliament introducing the new legislation, Battulga alleged that the country’s law enforcement leaders were “part of a conspiracy system” that “fabricat[ed] criminal cases with a political agenda” while covering up others. The president pointed to Mongolia’s numerous unresolved corruption scandals to argue that the institutions of justice were “serving the officials who nominated and appointed them” rather than the public, and he argued that reducing the independence of the judiciary, the prosecutorial apparatus, and the IAAC would make those institutions more responsive to the popular will to fight corruption.

President Battulga is correct when he asserts that Mongolia has a corruption problem of serious, perhaps epidemic, proportions. Mongolians regularly list corruption as one of the country’s biggest issues (second only to unemployment in a 2018 survey) and political institutions such as parliament and political parties as among the most corrupt entities. The past few years have been especially scandal-plagued. During the 2017 presidential campaign, all three candidates faced accusations of corruption; most egregiously, the MPP candidate—who, until January 2019, served as speaker of the Mongolian parliament—was caught on video discussing a plan to sell government offices in a $25 million bribery scheme. Further, late in 2018, journalists discovered that numerous politically-connected Mongolians, including somewhere from 23 to 49 of the 75 sitting members of parliament, had been treating a government program designed to provide funding for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as a personal piggy bank, taking out over a million dollars in low-cost loans. Beyond these scandals, Mongolia’s poor enforcement record compounds its corruption problem. For example, in 2015, only 7% of cases investigated by the IAAC resulted in convictions, and in 2018 public approval of the IAAC reached an all-time low.

But is there any reason to believe that President Battulga is right that giving him greater personal control over law enforcement and the judiciary will lead to less corruption? All the evidence points to no:

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Will the United States Please Admit It has an Illicit Enrichment Law

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United States officials have asserted for at least two decades that a law would make it a crime for a public servant to hold wealth he or she cannot show was honestly acquired would be unconstitutional. Officials say “illicit enrichment” laws reverse the burden of proof in a criminal trial, violate the presumption of innocence, and therefore infringe a criminal defendant’s right to a fair trial.  The State Department made the claim during negotiations for the 1997 Inter-American Convention Against Corruption; it surfaced most recently in a February 26 decision of the Ukrainian Constitutional Court where a majority cited the U.S. position in striking down Ukraine’s illicit enrichment statute.

The assertion is wrong. Or at best highly misleading.  Americans can be prosecuted for holding wealth greater than what their tax return shows they can afford. Like an illicit enrichment prosecution, a defendant in a tax evasion case who cannot produce evidence showing how the wealth was acquired risks conviction for a serious crime, one that today carries a fine of up to $100,000, imprisonment for five years, or both.

U.S. courts have developed a rich body of case law applying this American version of an illicit enrichment law that shows how prosecutors can convict defendants of living beyond their means without violating their fair trial rights. Prosecutors and courts in nations where illicit enrichment laws are recent additions to the statute books would find this jurisprudence instructive in obviating human rights concerns about their nations’ statute. If only they knew about it.

Would an authoritative American spokesperson please correctly state U.S. law? Or at least publicize the web site where U.S. illicit enrichment jurisprudence can be consulted? Continue reading →