What Might We Learn from the (Predicted) Walmart Settlement?

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My post two weeks ago discussed reports that Walmart is on the verge of reaching a settlement with the U.S. government regarding allegations that several of Walmart’s foreign subsidiaries violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), and that the total penalties that Walmart would pay would be around $300 million. That may sound like a big number, but it’s much smaller than the $1 billion penalty some commentators predicted when the investigation got under way, and only half of the $600 million the U.S. government was reportedly demanding as recently as last October.

As I write this, a settlement still hasn’t been formally announced, though it’s possible it will have been by the time this post is published. (I’m traveling this week, so I wrote this post a several days in advance and wasn’t able to update it to reflect any developments that may have occurred in the last 72 hours or so.) But let’s assume for the moment that the media reports are accurate, and that sometime this year – approximately six years after Walmart first disclosed to the SEC and DOJ that it might have an FCPA problem – the case settles for around $300 million. What would we learn from that?

Or perhaps I should frame the question more starkly, at the risk of oversimplification:

  • There are a bunch of folks out there (the “FCPA Reform” crowd) who argue that the U.S. government’s approach to FCPA enforcement is out of control, with the government imposing enormous and unjustified costs on companies for relatively minor and/or unproven infractions. The government can do this, the argument goes, because the government has corporations over a barrel: most corporations can’t risk being indicted for FCPA violations, and so (the FCPA Reform crowd asserts) the government can and does extract exorbitant settlements with little regard to whether the government’s legal theories have an adequate basis in law and fact.
  • Then there are a bunch of folks (lat’s call them the “FCPA, A-OK” crowd) who think that the aforementioned concerns are grossly exaggerated, and that in fact the U.S. government’s FCPA enforcement posture is reasonable, grounded in a plausible view of the law, and that allegations of overreaching don’t withstand critical scrutiny. (And then of course there are those who think that the government isn’t nearly aggressive enough in enforcing the FCPA, and that in fact both the resources devoted to investigation and enforcement, as well as the penalties, should be increased dramatically.)

If the Walmart settlement resembles what the most recent media reports predict, I think that both the “FCPA Reform” crowd and the “FCPA, A-OK” crowd can and will find material to support their positions. Continue reading →

The Toll Corruption Takes on Afghan Security Force Capacity

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Corruption in Afghanistan and its role in the ongoing instability of the country has been discussed on this blog before (see, for example, here, here, and here), but for the most part in fairly general, strategic-level terms. In this post, I’m going to zoom in and explain in greater detail two particularly insidious types of corruption that plague the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF): 1) the problem of “ghost” soldiers, and 2) the pilfering of fuel, weapons, and other supplies intended for security force personnel. These forms of corruption leave Afghan security forces hollow and ill-equipped to accomplish the missions assigned to them. As long as pervasive corruption continues to undermine force capacity, readiness, and morale, the prospect of Afghan government forces gaining the upper hand on the Taliban and other insurgents remains slim.

“Ghost soldiers” are fictitious troops added to personnel rosters by corrupt officials who then collect the extra pay allocated for these (in some cases deceased, in some cases no longer active, and in some cases totally made-up) soldiers. To give a sense of the scale of the problem, consider the 215th Corps of the Afghan National Army. In 2015, local officials suggested that up to 40 percent of names on the books did not correspond to actively-serving soldiers. For the 215th Corps, with an authorized strength of 18,000, that would mean fewer than 11,000 soldiers were actually available to fight. Earlier this year, US Army Major General Richard Kaiser, commander of Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CTSC-A), told the Wall Street Journal that the US had removed from the Afghan military payrolls more than 30,000 suspected ghost soldiers. That group of names amounted to over one-sixth of the Afghan army, significantly less than 40 percent but nevertheless a staggering figure. For reference, 30,000 is the same number of additional US troops President Obama sent to Afghanistan in December 2009 in a surge deemed necessary to turn the tide in the conflict.

Continue reading →

If Voters Hate Corruption, Why Do Elected Politicians Resist Anticorruption Reform? Lessons from South Dakota

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If U.S. voters dislike corruption so much, why don’t U.S. politicians see anticorruption as a winning issue—or at the very least feel more pressure to act aggressively against the corruption that voters claim to hate? This question, which has been explored on this blog before, is interesting to consider in the context of recent developments in South Dakota. South Dakota is considered to be one of the most corrupt states in the U.S., and in recent years has suffered through several major public corruption scandals, including massive misappropriations after the state privatized its EB-5 visa program, and the theft of over a million dollars earmarked for scholastic grants for the state’s American Indian population. In the past, although some Democratic state representatives had introduced bills to crack down on corruption, these measures failed in largely party-line votes in South Dakota’s Republican-dominated state legislature. Yet South Dakota, like many U.S. states, has a ballot initiative process that empowers voters to approve new laws by popular referendum. Last November, South Dakota voters used this process to approve Initiated Measure 22 (IM-22), also known as the “South Dakota Anti-Corruption Act.” While IM-22, despite its title, is not a direct anticorruption bill—its focus was on reforming campaign finance and lobbying—the message from the South Dakota voters was clear: they saw corruption as a problem and wanted to take measures to combat it.

Yet after the referendum passed, Republican lawmakers immediately took steps to halt the new rule. Within two weeks, 25 Republican South Dakota lawmakers brought suit against the state, arguing that the ethics commission created by the referendum violated the state’s constitution, and they succeeded in getting a temporary injunction against the new rules. Ultimately, the South Dakota State Senate struck down the law, using a provision of state law that allows the state legislature that repeals a referendum. Thus elected stood in direct opposition to an attempt to combat corruption enacted through a popular democratic initiative. Moreover, events in South Dakota reveal that some of the more conventional explanations that have been offered—including by previous analyses on this blog—are at best incomplete.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Turning Big Data Into a Useful Anticorruption Tool in Africa

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GAB is delighted to welcome back Dr. Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett of the University of Sussex, who contributes today’s guest post:

Many anticorruption advocates are excited about the prospects that “big data” will help detect and deter graft and other forms of malfeasance. As part of a project in this vein, titled Curbing Corruption in Development Aid-Funded Procurement, Mihály Fazekas, Olli Hellmann, and I have collected contract-level data on how aid money from three major donors is spent through national procurement systems; our dataset comprises more than half a million contracts and stretching back almost 20 years. But good data alone isn’t enough. To be useful, there must be a group of interested and informed users, who have both the tools and the skills to analyse the data to uncover misconduct, and then lobby governments and donors to listen to and act on the findings. The analysis of big datasets to find evidence of corruption – for example, the method developed by Mihály Fazekas to identify “red flags” of corruption risks in procurement contract data—requires statistical skills and software, both of which are in short supply in many parts of the developing world, such as sub-Saharan Africa.

Yet some ambitious recent initiatives are trying to address this problem. Lately I’ve had the privilege to be involved in one such initiative, led by Oxford mathematician Balázs Szendrői, that helps empower a group of young African mathematicians to analyse “big data” on public corruption. Continue reading →

U.S. to Honor Corruption Fighters from Afghanistan, Angola, Guatemala, Malaysia, and Ukraine

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Afghanistan NGO leader Khalil Parsa, Angolan journalist Rafael Marques de Morais, Guatemalan judge Claudia Escobar, Malaysian civil society activist Cynthia Gabriel, and Ukrainian investigative journalist Denys Bihus will share the 2017 Democracy Award for their work promoting democracy in their countries.  Bestowed annually by the National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. democracy promotion agency, the ceremony will be held June 7 at the U.S. Capitol.  Republican House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan and the House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi will both speak.

This year’s award is significant for three reasons.  In the wake of concerns Trump Administration rhetoric has raised about America’s commitment to human rights and democracy, Speaker Ryan and Leader Pelosi’s participation is a reminder that a strong, bipartisan consensus on these basic, universal values remains deeply embedded in U.S. political culture.  Second is the recognition by the National Endowment, perhaps the world’s leading advocate of democracy, that the fight against corruption is an essential element in building a democratic state.  Finally, the award is one more sign that those fighting corruption at home are not alone, that the international community supports them and stands with them.

More on the ceremony, biographies of each recipient, and the National Endowment’s democracy promotion work here.

Jared Kushner May Have Violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

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Recent media reports – which would be even more sensational if we weren’t getting so desensitized to Trump-related scandals – indicate that prior to Trump’s inauguration, his son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner had private meetings with Russian government officials, including both Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Russian state-owned bank (and a close associate of Vladamir Putin). We still don’t know (and may never know) the precise contents of the meeting, but based on circumstantial evidence, several of the media reports discuss speculations Kushner and his Russian government contacts discussed the possibility of extending financing to business ventures owned by Kushner or his family (including, most notably, a financially struggling office building at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan), if Kushner would help to persuade his father-in-law, the President-Elect of the United States, to lift the sanctions that the U.S. had imposed on Russia for its military intervention in Ukraine.

Again, we don’t yet know whether this is true. But let’s suppose for a moment that some version of that story is approximately correct: that during conversations with Russian government officials, Jared Kushner proposed or endorsed the idea that he would try to persuade his father-in-law to lift the Russia sanctions, and that Kushner did so because he believed (or was told) that if he did, a Russian state-owned development bank would provide valuable financing for his family’s business.

If that’s what occurred, then even nothing further came of these discussions, then there’s a very good argument that Jared Kushner committed a criminal violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Though there’s been quite a bit of discussion in the reports so far about various federal laws that Kushner may or may not have been broken in connection with these meetings (such as the little-used Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from interfering with U.S. diplomacy). But I haven’t seem much discussion of the FCPA angle. So even though it might still seem unrealistic to imagine that FCPA charges will be brought, let me elaborate a bit on why I think there’s a plausible case for an FCPA violation here, if the evidence supports the characterization of the meetings sketched above: Continue reading →

China Should Go After Bribe Takers in FCPA Cases

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As other contributors to this blog have noted (see here, here, here, here, and here), in transnational corruption prosecutions there is a huge disparity in the enforcement of corruption laws against bribe-givers (the “supply side”) and bribe-takers (the “demand side”). For example, corporations have been penalized under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) for bribes they allegedly paid to foreign officials, but the foreign officials implicated in these enforcement actions have largely remained untouched under their respective countries’ legal and political regimes. The reasons why demand-side governments have not stepped up and investigated officials who have been implicated in FCPA cases may include the lack of political will, the lack of capacity, and lack of inter-governmental cooperation. The particular reasons likely vary from country to country.

The People’s Republic of China is one of the demand-side countries that has demonstrated such a disparity. In 2016, for example, the SEC concluded 26 FCPA-related enforcement actions, 14 of which were related to corruption in China. In the same year, the DOJ published 24 FCPA-related enforcement actions as well as five declinations under its pilot program, and ten of these cases involved China. (Note that there were some overlap between the DOJ and the SEC’s enforcement actions.) Yet there has been no report about China initiating investigations into any of the officials implicated in these cases. This suggests a failure, or missed opportunity, in China’s otherwise aggressive and wide-ranging anticorruption campaign. If the government officials who take bribes can escape without any consequences, even as the bribe-paying firms are penalized, it will be very hard to effect fundamental changes to corrupt business and cultural norms, which eventually will become roadblocks to the Chinese economy’s healthy and sustainable development. Furthermore, unlike other countries, China does not seem to face significant structural obstacles that prevent it from acting on these FCPA cases. It has the political will and capacity, and it has been collaborating with the U.S. government on other matters, such as bringing back corrupt fugitives from the U.S. It seems to be just a matter of awareness or choice. This post urges the Chinese government to take a look into the government officials implicated in the FCPA cases.

Continue reading →

Anticorruption Bibliography–May 2017 Update

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An updated version of my anticorruption bibliography is available from my faculty webpage. A direct link to the pdf of the full bibliography is here, and a list of the new sources added in this update is here. As always, I welcome suggestions for other sources that are not yet included, including any papers GAB readers have written.

Guest Post: Trump’s Pledge To Enforce the Global Magnitsky Act–A Skeptical View

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Ilya Zaslavskiy, a research expert with the Free Russia Foundation, contributes today’s guest post:

Earlier this month the White House sent a letter to Congress pledging a commitment to the “robust and thorough enforcement” of the 2016 Global Magnitsky Act (GMA). The GMA, which grew out of a similar 2012 law that focused only on Russia, allows the executive branch to impose certain sanctions—including visa bans and freezing of U.S. assets—on any foreign citizen who commits gross human rights violations or who retaliates against whistleblowers who expose corruption. After Trump won the election, many feared that his administration would shelve meaningful enforcement of the GMA. (After all, the Obama Administration had also been reluctant to implement the original Magnitsky Act aggressively, and did so only under pressure from Congress.) In light of those low expectations, the White House’s statement was taken by many as an encouraging sign.

But many activists and NGOs fighting corruption, in Putin’s Russia and elsewhere, remain rightly skeptical. After all, Trump’s praise and upbeat rhetoric about corrupt authoritarian leaders—not only Putin, but President Erdogan or Turkey and President Duterte of the Philippines—naturally call into question the Administration’s seriousness about aggressive GMA enforcement. Consider further the fact that, despite the overwhelming evidence coming out of Chechnya that its president Ramzan Kadyrov has authorized massive abuses against the LGBT community and opened what is amounting to prisons for gays, there are no signs that the Trump Administration is considering adding Kadyrov to any open sanctions lists, despite not only recent events, but his long track record of corruption and human rights abuses.

Moreover, the White House’s statement in support of the GMA might be an attempt to create the appearance of taking a firm stand against corruption and human rights abuses, to diminish political momentum for more consequential actions. Specifically in regard to Russia, the latest statement about the GMA should also be understood in the context of the broader scandal regarding the Trump team’s ties to Russia. This scandal has, if anything, intensified anti-Russian sentiment in Congress. Not only have leading Senators and Representatives come out in strong support of sustaining existing sanctions against Russia, but there are now a half-dozen initiatives under consideration in Congress that would both codify and expand these sanctions. In such context, it might actually be useful to Trump (and arguably his Russian friends) to appear to be taking firm measures against Russia and other kleptocrats, while resisting adoption or implementation of more meaningful responses. The recent White House statement pledging robust enforcement of the GMA fits that narrative. After all, rhetoric aside, neither the original Magnitsky Act nor the GMA create more than a small headache for Trump and Russians. Only few really high level names have been sanctioned under those initiatives. Financial sanctions (particularly restrictions on long-term loans) are what matters for the Kremlin most. Indeed, Russian leadership might even be happy to have the Magnitsky laws in place if those restrictions are relaxed.

 

Venezuelans Out Kleptocrats’ Kids

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Those cursed to live in a country where leaders are stealing the nation’s resources wholesale are rarely able to stop them.  Calling the police, complaining to the prosecutor, or appealing to the legislature is pointless: in a kleptocracy the thieves control the machinery of the state.  Speaking out is futile.  Those who do are quickly silenced — imprisoned if they not become the victim of state-sponsored assassination.

So it is particularly welcome to report that the citizens of Venezuela, the latest nation to become victim of massive, “grand” corruption by its leaders, recently hit upon a way to strike back. Even better is how they are doing it: using the social media posts of the kleptocrats’ kids. The Twitter account VVsincensura (“Venezuelans uncensored”) scours the internet collecting posts by the children of Venezuela’s kleptocrats showing them living the high life in Paris, Hong Kong, Sydney, and the like while the nation sinks ever deeper into a state of penury.  From videos of the Caracas mayor’s daughter surfing in Australia to pictures of a former state official’s offspring helicoptering around the Middle East, VVsincensura regularly, indeed sometimes hourly, tweets out evidence of how well one’s kids can vacation, dine, and tour when the government picks up the tab.  Particularly galling are photos of an ex-Minister of Health’s children sightseeing in China while the country experiences a medical emergency because it has no money to pay for basic medicines and hospital supplies.

Venezuela’s kleptocrats are yelping over the outing of their kids (example here).  More significantly, the steady stream of snapshots showing them, drink in hand, languishing by a fancy pool or on white sands beach while the mass of Venezuelans scrounge for life’s basic necessities is starting to have an impact — both in Venezuela and abroad.

Within in Venezuela VVsincensura has stripped the last shred of legitimacy from the thieves ruling the country.  Their claim to power is that they speak for Venezuela’s poor.  But as more and more pictures of their kids in private jets, on luxurious beaches, or in five star restaurants circulate, that claim has become a dark national joke.  It has also pumped new life to Venezuela’s beleaguered domestic opposition.  The only thing now keeping the kleptocrats in power is the security forces, and one has to ask how many pictures of generals’ sons and daughters living it up in Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Sao Paulo will it take before front-line soldiers begin deserting en masse.

Outside Venezuela the vulgar display of wealth by kids of kleptocrats has become so revolting that it has begun to spark action. At this writing some 30,000 Australians have signed a petition demanding that their government revoke the student visa of Lucía Rodríguez, daughter of Caracas’ mayor and niece of the Foreign Minister.  Rodríguez, ostensibly a student at a pricey Sydney University (tuition $18,000), is shown riding the waves off a Sydney beach in one VVSincensura post and enjoying a lifestyle far removed from that of an ordinary student in others. In the meantime, her father earns less than a $1,000 a year as mayor while preaching the virtues of an austere life to his constituents.

The Australian government should heed its citizens’ plea and send Rodríguez home, and that civil society in other nations hosting the kids of Venezuela’s kleptocrats should file similar petitions.  Denying kleptocrats the ability to send their kids abroad would remove one incentive for them to rob their nation blind.  More importantly, perhaps if the kids are penned up in Venezuela they will begin to realize just how hard life is for the great majority and how much responsibility their parents bear for making it so. Who knows, a few uncomfortable conversations around the family dinner table might prompt some of the thieves to go straight? For if a parent craves anything, it is their child’s love and respect.

While a single Twitter account might seem a feeble weapon to fight kleptocracy, VVSincensura shows that this is not so.  That when aimed at the right target, it can be a powerful weapon for combatting grand corruption. The ostentatious, revolting display of wealth by kleptocrats’ kids VVSincensura features reveals in a dramatic way the evil of grand corruption.  It is a tactic deserves widespread emulation — by citizens of other kleptocracies and anticorruption activists everywhere.