Special Podcast Episode: ICRN Forum Panel on Communication Between Academics and Policymakers

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. This episode differs a bit from our usual format. Rather than featuring an interview of a single expert, this week’s episode features a recording of a roundtable discussion held at the fifth annual Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network (ICRN) Forum, which was held virtually last month with the sponsorship and support of Global Integrity. One of the highlights of the Forum was a special panel entitled “How Can Academia and Policy Communicate in Anti-Corruption?”, which, as the name implies, focuses on improving the channels of communication between the research community (especially academics based at universities) and the policy and advocacy communities. The roundtable, which was moderated by Johannes Tonn of Global Integrity, featured three distinguished experts with substantial experience working to bridge the gap between research and practice: Professor Heather Marquette of the University of Birmingham (currently seconded part-time to UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office); Professor Leslie Holmes of the University of Melbourne; and Jonathan Cushing, who leads Transparency International’s Global Health Program.The panelists had a lively discussion about the importance of improving channels of communication between researchers and practitioners, the challenges that researchers face in engaging with the policy community, and some of the approaches that might help overcome those challenges. While I hope the episode may be of interest to all of our readers, I would particularly commend it to up-and-coming scholars. One more quick note: After this week’s episode, KickBack will be going on hiatus for the (Northern hemisphere’s) summer break. We will be back in September with new episodes! You can also find our most recent episode, as well as an archive of prior episodes, at the following locations: KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

eSports: A Playground for Corruption?

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Video game tournaments—sometimes referred to as “eSports”—are relatively new but increasingly popular. In these tournaments, players compete for cash prizes. In certain U.S. states it is now legal to place bets on eSports tournaments, though in other states such betting is prohibited. The growing popularity of eSports and the rise of eSports betting unfortunately gives rise to the risks of the same sorts of corruption that we have seen in traditional sports, such as gamblers (including organized criminal betting syndicates) bribing players to fix matches. And this is not purely hypothetical: Recently the FBI obtained evidence that criminal betting syndicates were bribing a group of players to throw matches in certain eSports competitions.

Responding effectively to bribery-related corruption in eSports is complicated by the fact that, unlike traditional sporting leagues, eSports do not have a central governing body. Rather, each game publisher controls its own tournaments, and many tournament operators have not taken the steps necessary to implement effective mechanisms for identifying betting-related match-fixing activities and levying punishment on bad actors. In 2016, a group of eSports stakeholders tried to address this issue by establishing a nonprofit association called the Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC), which is tasked with investigating and disciplining individuals involved in corrupt eSports activities. But ESIC only has authority over competitions organized by its members, and players sanctioned for match-fixing activities within an ESIC member tournament can still compete in non-ESIC member competitions.

More effective measures are therefore needed to prevent the spread of corruption in eSports. In particular, those states that permit betting on eSports tournaments should require, as a condition for betting on such matches to be lawful, that the tournament and betting operators join an authorized eSports governing board equivalent to the ESIC. Authorized governing boards should have the following responsibilities and obligations:

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Guest Post: Highlights from the UNGASS Anticorruption Session Side Events

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Last month, the UN General Assembly held its first-ever Special Session focused specifically on the fight against corruption. In addition to the UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) itself, various governments and civil society organizations arranged various side events, held in parallel with the main UNGASS meeting, to allow activists, policymakers, and researchers to share their expertise. Today’s guest post, contributed by Michaella Baker, a JD-MBA student at Northwestern University (working in collaboration with Northwestern Law Professor Juliet Sorensen), summarizes the themes and principal contributions of three of these side events.

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Guest Post: The Case for Corruption Truth Commissions

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Today’s guest post is from Blair Glencorse, the Executive Director of the Accountability Lab, a civil society network that promotes accountability, transparency, and open government.

When corruption is deeply entrenched, it is very difficult to dislodge through criminal prosecution and similar law enforcement efforts. In systems that create very strong incentives to behave corruptly—those where powerful social norms favor graft over honesty—one can expect widespread resistance to attempts at stepped-up enforcement of anticorruption rules, given the number of people who might rationally fear being implicated in wrongdoing. Moreover, given the reluctance of participants in systemically corrupt regimes to disclose their illicit conduct and improper relationships, it is very hard to understand how the corrupt systems operate, who the most culpable perpetrators are, and how such systems can be more effectively dismantled.

A promising response to these problems might be drawn from the experience of addressing widespread human rights violations in moments of transition: truth commissions. While it would obviously be very difficult to set up such a commission during normal times, when the opportunity arises—say, after a regime change, or a significant political turnover sparked by popular protests against corruption—a country could set up an independent body—a corruption truth commission—to manage a process by which amnesty would be offered to those who had engaged in unlawful corrupt acts, in exchange for a full and truthful accounting of the corrupt conduct that they had perpetrated or witnessed.

This approach has several practical benefits. It creates a permanent record of the abuse of power, builds an evidence base to go after those perpetrators who either reject the offer of amnesty or are too high-level to be eligible, and can help countries recover ill-gotten assets. By exposing the workings of corrupt networks, corruption truth commissions would also help us better understand how to identify and counter corrupt networks before they can take root.

While the appropriate design of such a body would obviously depend on the specific circumstances of each individual country, five general principles are broadly applicable:

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A Closer Look at Corruption, Hamas, and Violence in the Gaza Strip

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The recent violent clash between Israel and Hamas followed a pattern that has become depressingly familiar since Hamas won control of the Gaza Strip in 2006: Hamas instigates violence towards Israel and its civilians; Israel responds with military strikes targeting Hamas’s weaponry infrastructure, but since Hamas has intentionally embedded itself in Gaza’s civilian population, Israel’s strikes inevitably claim innocent lives. The question whether Israel’s response was proportional or excessive saturates the news and media. Eventually the two sides reach a tentative ceasefire, the violence subsides, and attention turns elsewhere—until the vicious cycle repeats.

Most readers, whatever their views on the underlying moral and legal issues, are likely familiar with this pattern. But what does this have to do with corruption? Quite a bit, actually. 

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Something Is Rotten from the State of Denmark

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In this year’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) rankings, Denmark yet again topped the list (tied with New Zealand) as the world’s cleanest country. But the CPI has well-known limitations—including the fact that it focuses on corruption within countries while excluding how country’s nationals behave abroad. And in this latter context, Denmark performs rather poorly. Danish companies have faced numerous credible allegations of paying bribes worth hundreds of millions of dollars in dozens of countries (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). Several of those countries have been sanctioned by the World Bank and the European Union. Yet Danish companies have largely escaped suffering any consequence within Denmark for their corrupt practices abroad. Of the thirteen major allegations of foreign bribery brought in the last decade by Danish authorities against Danish companies, several closed without adequate investigation, and none resulted in any prosecution. No wonder that Denmark’s last report card on from the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Working Group—released in 2015—found Denmark’s performance in enforcing its laws against foreign bribery to be deeply wanting. Yet six years and many public commitments later, Denmark has done very little (other than publishing a three-page “How to avoid corruption” pamphlet) to address its shortcomings in this area.

So, what’s stopping the “least corrupt” country in the world (at least, according to the CPI) from tackling its foreign bribery problem? If allegations of foreign bribery are widespread and credible, why have Danish companies continued to enjoy effective domestic impunity? There are two ways to answer this question, one of which focuses on the legal deficiencies in Denmark’s criminal code, which make it hard for prosecutors to bring winning cases, and the other of which focuses on the reasons why Denmark hasn’t changed these laws, notwithstanding critical commentaries and advice from organizations like the OECD.

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What the Odebrecht Case Teaches

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The anticorruption community owes the American Economic Association and Nicolás Campos, Eduardo Engel, Ronald D. Fischer, and Alexander Galetovic a debt of gratitude. The AEA for publishing their article “The Ways of Corruption in Infrastructure: Lessons from the Odebrecht Case” and making it available free to non-members (here). The four Chilean scholars for showing how much can be learned when a command of the literature on corruption is coupled with a careful, painstaking study of a single case.

In 2016, the Brazilian engineering and construction company Odebrecht admitted in a settlement with American, Brazilian, and Swiss authorities (here) to bribing 600 officials in 12 states either to secure contracts to build roads, powerplants, and other large infrastructure projects or to agree to raise the contract price during construction of the project. Information the authors pieced together from the settlement documents show the company grossed $3.3 billion in profits from paying $788 million in bribes.  These numbers confirm the obvious: the returns from infrastructure corruption are enormous, and significant resources should be devoted to preventing it.

Digging deeper into the massive amount of paper the several prosecutions of Odebrecht and its executives have generated, the authors report other findings that are not so obvious.

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New Podcast Episode, Featuring Robert Barrington

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, I interview Robert Barrington, currently a professor of practice at the University of Sussex’s Centre for the Study of Corruption, who previously served for over a decade as the executive director of Transparency International UK. Over the course of the interview, Professor Barrington and I discuss how is background in the financial sector informed his work as a civil society advocate, the strategies that proved most effective in lobbying for improving anticorruption and corporate transparency laws in the UK (especially the UK Bribery Act, the creation of the “unexplained wealth order” mechanism, and the public registry of companies’ beneficial owners), and the prospects for future progress on fighting corruption in the UK in the post-Brexit world. You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations: KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

Announcement: The Anticorruption Corpus Launch Event

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As I mentioned in a previous post, the anticorruption NGO Global Integrity (GI), in collaboration with the UK’s Anti-Corruption Evidence Research Programme, have created a new resource for anticorruption researchers–an Anticorruption Evidence Library–which is based on the bibliography of anticorruption sources that I started compiling several years back (and for which I announce monthly updates on this blog). Tomorrow (Wednesday, June 23), at 9 am US East Coast Time, Global Integrity will be hosting an online event to mark the launch of the library, and to provide scholars, activists, and other researchers more information about how to use the library to identify and access sources that can contribute to developing a solid, evidence-based approach to assessing and addressing corruption problems. You can find out more information about the event, along with a link to preregister, here. I hope to see many of you there!

The Case Against High-Denomination Bank Notes

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Although the use of cash continues to decline in both the legitimate and illicit economies, lots of criminal transactions, including bribe payments, still use cash—slipped into pockets or envelopes, or carried in briefcases and suitcases. The anonymity, untraceability, and universal acceptance of cash make it useful for many types of criminal activity, including not only corruption, but also drug trafficking, human trafficking, and terrorism. Cash is also indispensable to money laundering, because it both obscures the source of funds and enables money to flow undetected across borders. (As a Europol report observed, “[a]lthough not all use of cash is criminal, all criminals use cash at some stage in the money-laundering process.”) Indeed, as governments and banks increasingly scrutinize electronic transactions, parts of the illicit economy will embrace cash all the more.

Nobody seriously argues for eliminating cash entirely. But there is a simple step that monetary authorities can and should take to make cash-based criminal transactions substantially harder, without substantially impinging on the legitimate cash-based economy: eliminate high-denomination notes.

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