Statutory Leniency for Bribe-Givers in Egypt: Revolutionary or Reprehensible?

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Bribery and other forms of collusive corruption are notoriously difficult to detect. In many cases, the only people who even know that a crime has been committed are the perpetrators. To address the inherent difficulty of proving bribery, many countries use so-called leniency agreements, in which the government offers some form of sanction reduction or exemption to parties who voluntarily self-report and provide evidence against co-conspirators. Most of these leniency programs are designed and implemented by prosecutors’ offices (though they may be authorized by statute). Prosecutors exercise discretion in deciding whether and to what degree to offer sanction reductions to cooperating parties. Under the typical anticorruption leniency program, a self-reporting bribe-giver cannot claim, as a matter of law, an entitlement to any sort of sanction exemption.

Egypt is different. Unusually, and perhaps uniquely, Egypt’s anti–bribery law (Article 107bis of the Penal Code No. 58 of 1937) offers a full and absolute exemption from sanctions for any bribe-giver who self-reports and gives evidence against the culpable bribe-taker.

This approach is misguided, for several reasons: Continue reading →

When and Why Do Whistleblower Reward Programs Succeed?

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It is often difficult to expose and unravel corruption schemes without the cooperation of insiders. Yet would-be whistleblowers are frequently deterred from making disclosures due to the personal and professional risks of doing so. One increasingly popular way that countries are addressing this problem is through whistleblower reward programs. While such programs vary widely in their specifics, most operate under the same basic framework, offering a whistleblower who discloses material nonpublic information that leads to an enforcement action a monetary reward—typically, a percentage of the fines imposed on the liable parties—as an inducement to come forward.

In the United States, which pioneered this mechanism, whistleblower reward programs have seen broad success. Between 1986 and 2020, whistleblower cases under the False Claims Act (FCA) brought in $46.5 billion in penalties, with whistleblowers receiving $7.8 billion in rewards. And this is only under the FCA—other U.S. whistleblower reward programs have also led to the recovery of significant additional sums. For example, under the whistleblower program created by the Dodd-Frank Act, which was created in 2011, whistleblower tips have contributed to at least $2 billion in financial remedies for violations of the securities laws, with over $720 million awarded to whistleblowers. The success of whistleblower reward programs in the United States has inspired similar programs in several other countries, including South Korea, Canada, Nigeria, Ghana, Hungary, and Kenya. But not all of these programs have been similarly successful. For example, in Ghana, the first country in Africa to introduce a whistleblower reward program, no rewards are known to have been issued—in fact, few have made use of the Ghanaian Whistleblower Act’s provisions at all.

What factors help explain when a whistleblower reward program will work as intended? There is no easy or simple answer—the issue is complex, and the effect of any given program depends in part on details of the program’s design, including the prerequisites for receiving a reward and the scope of the program, as well as the country’s culture around whistleblowing. That said, two factors stand out as key indicators of whether a whistleblower reward program will succeed in encouraging substantial numbers of whistleblowers to come forward:

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New Podcast Episode, Featuring Shannon Green

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. (The episode came out a few weeks ago; I apologize for the late announcement, but I’ve been traveling for a bit.) In latest episode, host Liz Dávid-Barrett interviews Shannon Green, Executive Director of USAID’s Anti-Corruption Task Force, about USAID’s new anticorruption strategy, as well as the general challenge of fighting kleptocracies and USAID’s new dekleptification guide. You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations:

KickBack was originally founded as a collaborative effort between GAB and the Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network (ICRN). It is now hosted and managed by the University of Sussex’s Centre for the Study of Corruption. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends!

Moldova’s Fight Against Corruption: Reset Needed

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Today’s Guest Post is submitted by Dumitrita Bologan on behalf of Moldova’s Independent Anti-Corruption Advisory Committee (CCIA). The CCIA is a corruption watchdog agency with members drawn equally from Moldovan civil society and the international community. Established by presidential decree in 2021, it recommends measures to bolster Moldova’s fight against corruption and periodically reports on their implementation. The post below is drawn from its latest report, “Disrupting Dysfunctionality”: Resetting Republic of Moldova’s Anti-Corruption Institutions. While specific to Moldova, the issues it raises about coordination between law enforcement agencies and the need for judicial reform will be familiar to those working in other countries and the insights about how to address the problems of value to many.

The Republic of Moldova has been struggling with corruption for years, it being acknowledged as a main obstacle to development. The relevant stakeholders have implemented a wide range of measures to prevent and fight corruption, but they have neither been accompanied by coherent policies nor strict adherence by all parties. As a result, they have often been ineffective, insufficient, and poorly executed.

As Disrupting Dysfunctionality shows, the weakest point has been the reform of justice institutions. Reforms initiated in 2011 produced modest results despite considerable investments and support from development partners, and these efforts suffered significant setbacks during the years 2016 – 2019 when elites captured state institutions. While some advances have been realized since, the impact has yet to be felt.

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Some (Semi-Serious) Fun With AI-Generated Anticorruption Content

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I’m not much of a tech person, but even I have been following with great interest the rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly the buzz around ChatGPT, Open AI’s natural language chat bot. As most readers are probably aware, ChatGPT has an uncanny ability to generate decent (if rather formulaic) responses to an extraordinary variety of inquiries. It can respond to follow up questions, make modifications upon request, and (I am told) write and revise computer code. I’ve only played around with it a little, and I haven’t come close to exploring everything it can do, but I thought I’d see what sorts of content in generates when asked some basic questions about the fight against corruption. This started as a kind of just-for-fun experimentation, but I actually think the content that ChatGPT generates on this topic might be useful grounds for further reflection from the anticorruption community, both about how this tool might be helpful in our work, and about how the content this tool generates might prompt us to strive to make our own work more creative, distinctive, and forward-looking.

In the remainder of this blog post, I’ll provide — without any editing — the responses that ChatGPT provided to the following three queries/requests:

  1. How can we fight public corruption effectively?
  2. How can we generate the political will to fight corruption?
  3. Write a keynote address for the International Anti-Corruption Conference.

Here are the AI-generated responses to each: Continue reading →

Why We Shouldn’t Be Overly Concerned About Corruption in the Reconstruction of Ukraine

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Though the war in Ukraine continues to rage, scholars and policymakers around the world have already begun to look ahead to what it will take to help rebuild the country—a project that the Ukrainian government estimates will cost upwards of $750 billion, and which will likely entail substantial international assistance from a broad coalition of countries. Any project of this magnitude—one that involves large government contracts for construction, supplies, and other services—raises concerns about corruption. Indeed, concerns about the potential for widespread corruption in the reconstruction of Ukraine have already been voiced on this blog and elsewhere (see, for example, here, and here). But while this concern should be taken seriously, it should not be exaggerated. There are at least three reasons why the potential for corruption in the Ukrainian reconstruction process, while real, may not be nearly as severe as some of the current pessimistic commentary suggests:

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Islamic States Agree to Anticorruption Convention

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On 28 Jumada Al-Awwal, 1444h (December 22, 2022), Anticorruption Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation agreed to assist one another in preventing, detecting, investigating, and prosecuting corruption crimes.

The Makkah Al-Mukarramah Convention commits OIC’s 57 member states to exchange information and share expertise on bribery, embezzlement, trading in influence, and the other corruption offenses listed in the United Nations Convention Against Corruption. Member states foreign ministers are expected to ratify the Convention by March of this year.

The Convention is an important step forward. For two reasons. One, as a practical matter requests from one OIC member to another for assistance in locating fugitives, securing evidence, or recovering stolen assets often run up against obstacles ranging from outmoded procedures to a lack of trust between law enforcement agencies.

This makes it easy for embezzlers, bribe takers and payers, and other scam artists to escape prosecution.  Not only does the Convention require states to eliminate these barriers, but its creation of a General Secretariat and a Conference of State Parties should help smooth working relations among law enforcement personnel as well as provide a forum for resolving disputes.

The greater impact is surely the Convention’s demonstrative effect. Beyond an immediate effect on behavior, law serves an expressive function, creating and validating social norms. The OIC is in its own words “the collective voice of the Muslim world.” For the representative of the believers in one of the world’s great religions to join the fight against corruption validates and reaffirms the importance of the fight. That the English for “Makkah Al-Mukarramah” is “Holy City of Mecca” serves to emphasize this importance to Muslims of all states.

Corruption: Fuel for Femicide’s Fire

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On January 31, 2022, hundreds of protesters took to the streets of La Paz, Bolivia, regarding new revelations about Richard Choque Flores, who had raped upwards of 70 women and committed at least two femicides. (The term “femicide” refers to the intentional murder of women for gender-motivated reasons.) The La Paz protesters were not simply expressing their horror at Choque Flores’ heinous crimes. They were also denouncing the judicial and prosecutorial corruption that had enabled his continued predation. In fact, Choque Flores had already been arrested in 2015 and sentenced to 30 years in prison. His sentence was then reduced to a house arrest in 2019, whereupon he was able to murder two women from the comfort of his own home. How did Richard Choque Flores manage to get his sentence reduced in the first place? With a bribe of US$3,500 and a bottle of whisky.

Sadly, this story is not unique. In Bolivia as well as other Latin American countries (such as Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico), femicides not only occur at appallingly high rates, but they rarely ever get resolved. While femicide is certainly rooted in patriarchy, its rampant scope in Latin America cannot merely be explained by the misogyny of individual perpetrators. In 2021 alone, there were at least 108 known femicide cases in Bolivia, of which only 36% were solved. In Mexico, around 10 women are reportedly murdered per day (though the actual number is likely much higher). The femicide epidemic is by no means “accidental, ‘involuntary,’ or the result of ‘mere institutional incapacity.’” Rather, it is the product of profound and systematic corruption, which allows perpetrators to violate women with impunity, while imposing prohibitive barriers to justice for victims and their families.

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Vote Buying: Why the Secret Ballot Isn’t Enough

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Vote buying is an especially pernicious form of corruption, as it threatens to undermine the democratic process, thereby enabling other forms of corruption and misgovernance. One of the most important institutional mechanisms designed to inhibit vote buying is the secret ballot. First adopted in Australia in 1856, the secret ballot is now the norm in liberal democracies. Yet vote buying remains a problem in many such democracies, especially in the developing world (see here, here, and here). To better understand how to fight this form of corruption, it is important to understand why the secret ballot is not sufficient to eliminate the problem. While different communities face distinct challenges, there are several common mechanisms that allow vote buying to persist, even when it is impossible for the vote-buying politicians to verify that the voters they bribed actually voted the way that they had promised.

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Specialized Anticorruption Courts: The Updated U4 Paper and Panel

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Last month, I posted an announcement regarding a panel, which I moderated, at the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, on specialized anticorruption courts, which was held in conjunction with the release of the updated U4 Issue paper on that topic. (The original paper, which I coauthored with U4 Senior Advisor Sofie Schütte, was published in 2016.) Several readers who were not able to attend the livestream of the panel expressed interest in seeing the video recording, and I am pleased to say that the video is now available here.

The description of the panel, as it appears in the U4 website linked above, is as follows: Continue reading →