Guest Post: Why Nigeria’s Main Anticorruption Body Should Not Become a Debt Collection Agency, and How to Stop It

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Today’s guest post is from Pallavi Roy and Mitchell Watkins, respectively Research Director and Research Fellow at the University of London, SOAS Anti-Corruption Evidence Consortium (SOAS-ACE).

Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), established in 2003, was initially effective at investigating and prosecuting bribery, fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, and a host of other financial crimes. Indeed, it was instrumental in prosecuting senior political leaders and corporate actors involved in illegal activities, as well as in recovering significant stolen assets that belonged to the Nigerian state. More recently, however, the Commission has been subject to frequent political interference and corruption. For example, a recent SOAS-ACE study found that private actors—commercial banks, businesses, and high net-worth individuals—routinely exploit the coercive power of the EFCC to help them recover their debts, rather than turning to the courts and other civil dispute resolution mechanisms. This occurs even though, as a matter of law, civil debt collection lies outside the EFCC’s jurisdiction. Continue reading →

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Doussouba Konaté and Moussa Kondo

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, I interview Doussouba Konaté and Moussa Kondo, who are, respectively, the Program Officer for the Accountability Lab and the Country Director for Accountability Lab Mali. (The Accountability Lab is a civil society group organized as a network of local Accountability Labs that focus on fighting corruption and promoting accountability and integrity.) In our conversation, Doussouba and Moussa describe the Accountability Lab’s “human-centric” approach to fighting corruption, and discuss some of their main initiatives. These include the Integrity Icon project, which strives to “name and fame” honest government officials, and the civic action teams that help gather information in, and disseminate information to, local communities to facilitate collective action and promote accountability, while combating fake news. Our interview also discusses how, more recently, Accountability Lab Mali has sought to track the disbursement of COVID-19 relief funds. In addition to these specific initiatives, we also discuss the broader political situation in Mali and how the political challenges facing the country relate to the corruption problem, and what the highest priorities for anticorruption reform in Mali should be right now.

You can find this episode here. 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.

What Made Alexei Navalny an Anticorruption Icon?

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On August 20, 2020, former Russian presidential candidate Alexei Navalny fell ill while on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. He slipped into a coma and was immediately evacuated to Berlin, where doctors discovered that Navalny had been poisoned by a Soviet-era nerve agent. While the Kremlin has denied any involvement, the chemical nerve agent used on Navalny was similar to the one that Russia was accused of using to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in 2018.

A Kremlin-orchestrated attempt on Navalny’s life was hardly surprising. For the past decade, Navalny has been making a name for himself as one of the leading figures opposing Russian President Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party. Navalny has denounced United Russia as a “party of crooks and thieves” and has organized campaigns to unseat Putin-affiliated politicians across the country. Furthermore, Navalny’s investigative journalism has uncovered government corruption, and he has used these exposés to advocate for political reform and to bolster his own popularity, especially among the younger generation. Navalny’s success in exposing corruption highlights several interesting and unique tactics and personal attributes that allowed him to be an effective advocate in a country that routinely punishes government opposition.

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Fast-Tracking Justice: India’s New(ish) Strategy to Curb Corruption

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How do you deal with the problem of more than 6,000 corruption cases and nearly 5,000 criminal cases pending against politicians, some dating back almost 40 years? The answer, according to India’s Supreme Court: put a one-year time limit on cases involving politicians.

This decision, which was issued this past September in a “public interest litigation” case, seeks to increase public confidence in the judicial process and to make the legal system more effective in addressing India’s pervasive political corruption. Corrupt politicians in India are typically able to slow down legitimate prosecutions, for example by exploiting India’s complex court filing procedures, leading the cases to drag on for years or even decades. This delay increases the chances that key evidence will be lost or obscured—a process that corrupt defendants can and do help along by bribing, threatening, or even killing witnesses. By preventing cases from ending in conviction, corrupt politicians have created a de facto culture of impunity. The problem is particularly acute in the current parliament, where 43% of new members elected in 2019 had pending criminal charges. The Supreme Court’s order seeks to address this and other problems.

This isn’t the first time that the Supreme Court has ordered fast-tracking. The Supreme Court previously called for time-bound trials against politicians back in 2011, during the tenure of the corruption-riddled Congress Party, yet the case backlog remained. There is reason to believe, though, that this time is different. The current ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept into power in part by making anticorruption efforts a priority, and there are signs that the BJP’s general commitment to anticorruption may be having a meaningful impact in the context of the one-year order. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, the highest courts in (most) states submitted action plans for dispatching cases, and India’s Solicitor General said that he is “100% serious” about completing trials within a year. Despite certain serious challenges to effective implementation of this new fast-tracking program, India’s renewed commitment to moving the wheels of justice more quickly could prove powerful in holding corrupt politicians accountable and restoring public confidence in the judiciary.

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Guest Post: The Ukrainian Constitutional Court’s Invalidation of Anticorruption Laws Has Plunged the Country into a Double Crisis

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Today’s guest post is from Kyrylo Korol, a judicial clerk at the High Anti-Corruption Court of Ukraine.

This past fall, between August and October, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine (CCU) ruled that several of Ukraine’s most important anticorruption laws and institutions are unconstitutional.

  • The CCU first ruled unconstitutional the Decree of the President of Ukraine on the appointment of the director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), which is responsible for anticorruption investigations; the Court also invalidated the President’s powers to appoint NABU’s head, a decision that created uncertainty regarding the legitimacy of the current director of NABU. The Court reasoned that the because the power to appoint the NABU director was not included in the list of presidential powers specified in the Constitution, the President could not exercise this power. The CCU also ruled unconstitutional the external commission that evaluates NABU’s performance.
  • In a subsequent case, the CCU declared unconstitutional the powers of the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) to check the public official’s declarations of assets. The Court reasoned that the NACP’s powers to review asset declarations extended to asset declarations submitted by judges, and that this arrangement would give an executive body impermissible control over the judiciary. The CCU further ruled that the law that imposes criminal liability for knowingly submitting a false asset declarations was unconstitutional, on the grounds that the penalties (which can include fines of up to $1,700, community service, or, imprisonment and disqualification from certain offices) was unconstitutionally disproportionate to the damage caused by the crime. These decisions led to the closure of hundreds of criminal cases for false declaration and the acquittals of public officials who had been found guilty of this crime. Going forward, the elimination of penalties for public officials who fail to file asset declarations, or who file false declarations, essentially nullifies the financial declaration system.

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Guest Post: IMF General Counsel Rhoda Weeks-Brown on the Fund’s Role in Promoting Governance, Transparency and Accountability

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Since 2018 the IMF has laid greater stress on governance and corruption issues in its annual reviews of member countries’ economic performance and when extending loans to stabilize their economies and restore economic growth. GAB is delighted to publish this post by Fund General Counsel Rhoda Weeks-Brown explaining why the organization strengthened its focus on governance and corruption and what it is doing to help member countries promote good governance and combat corruption.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis like no other. It has brought about tragic human loss and suffering, coupled with disruptions in the social and economic order on a scale that we have not seen in living memory. The IMF’s response to help its member countries manage the crisis and save lives and livelihoods has been similarly unprecedented, including in the sheer speed and size of that effort. In only seven months, the institution has provided lending assistance of more than US$100 billion to over 80 countries, including over US$31 billion in emergency financing to 78 countries (as of December 4, 2020). We can all agree that the dire economic effects projected to result from the COVID crisis—including declines in living standards, increases in inequality, and a reversal of the decades-long declining trend in global poverty—have made the fight against corruption more urgent now than ever before.

Despite the speed of the IMF’s response, we have focused on safeguards to ensure that appropriate governance, transparency and accountability measures are in place even for our rapid emergency financing. This financing supports countries’ commitments to level up healthcare spending and provide income support for affected households and businesses. Our advice to countries has been “spend what you need, but keep the receipts.” Governments in turn have made firm commitments to address governance, transparency and accountability.

The IMF is also providing technical assistance to countries to help them make progress on these commitments. This reflects a clear understanding that improvements in transparency and accountability are driven by changes in institutional practices across multiple institutions involved in budgeting, spending, monitoring the use of public financial resources and responding to instances of misappropriation and misbehavior.

Governance—key to economic success

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Kleptocracy Strikes Mongolia? The Batbold Case

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Offshore Alert yesterday revealed the Mongolian government has charged former Prime Minister Batbold Sukhbaatar with receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from kickbacks and fraudulent and illegal transactions in deals involving the nation’s two largest mines. The case against the former prime minister, senior member of the ruling Mongolian People’s Party, and the party’s likely 2021 presidential candidate, is spelled out in a November 23 filing in a New York court.  The New York case together with similar ones in Hong Kong and London seeks a freeze on assets Batbold holds until the main case, brought in Mongolia, is decided.  There plaintiffs — the agency responsible for overseeing Mongolia’s natural resources and the state-owned companies that operate the two mines – ask that agreements between the two operating companies and shell companies they say Batbold secretly owns be invalidated and Batbold and accomplices disgorge all profits made on secret deals and as well as pay damages. The total could run into the hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars.  

Documents submitted in the New York case paint a picture familiar to students of kleptocracy.  With assistance from lawyers, accountants, and other enablers, Batbold allegedly established some 100 shell companies in at least ten countries to conceal his actions and hide his wealth.  Two things make the case worthy of careful study by all seeking to end the massive theft of a nation’s assets by its rulers:

i) the political will the governing party has shown in pursuing one of its own, and

ii) the quantum of information on an alleged kleptocrat’s wrongdoing that can be gleaned from a painstaking search of the public record.

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Guest Post: Making the Most of “Windows of Opportunity” for Anticorruption Reform

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Today’s guest post is from Florencia Guerzovich, María Soledad Gattoni, and Dave Algoso, a team of independent consultants who jointly authored the Open Society Foundation report on Seeing New Opportunities: How Global Actors Can Better Support Anti-Corruption Reformers.

Ukraine after the Maidan Revolution. Malaysia after the 1MDB Scandal. Brazil after Lava Jato.

In each of these countries—and in many other examples—something triggered a shift in the possibilities for anticorruption reform. Pick your favorite metaphor: the stars align, the winds shift, there’s a fork in the road. We use the term “window of opportunity”: a period when heightened attention to an issue like corruption makes anticorruption reforms more likely. When those windows open, reformers both inside and outside of government try to seize the opportunity to make progress, while contending with forces that aim to maintain the status quo or advance an authoritarian or populist response.

Reformers’ approaches shift in these moments, as do their needs. Though success is not guaranteed, the possibility of reform can increase when global support organizations—including foundations, multilaterals, and NGOs—are better able to meet those needs (while also doing no harm). What do reformers most need during these windows of opportunity? And what can global support organizations do to help meet those needs? With the Open Society Foundations (OSF), we undertook research into those questions, with a primary focus on three case studies:

  • In Guatemala, the “Guatemalan spring” that opened following the announcement of corruption investigations into President Otto Pérez Molina and others in 2015, and the subsequent election of Jimmy Morales;
  • In Slovakia, the mobilizations under the “For a Decent Slovakia” banner and reform efforts that followed the murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová in 2018;
  • In South Africa, the fight against state capture, which ended Jacob Zuma’s presidency and led to the administration of Cyril Ramaphosa in 2018.

Our findings, presented in a recent OSF report entitled Seeing New Opportunities: How Global Actors Can Better Support Anti-Corruption Reformers, were not always what we’d expected when we started the research. Collectively, our analysis of these case studies and other examples suggests some rethinking in terms of how to best support anticorruption reformers so that they can take maximum advantage of windows of opportunity when they arise. Continue reading →

Fighting Police Corruption in Nigeria: Learning from SARS’ Alleged Dissolution

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In 1992, the Nigerian police force created the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) to combat violent crimes such as armed robbery, kidnapping, murder, and hired assassination. In each state, SARS operates under the criminal investigations department of the state’s police command. Alas, SARS developed a reputation for corruptly extorting money from the targets of its investigations. To offer one example, a local software engineer alleged that heavily-armed SARS officers stopped him and ordered that he withdraw one million Naira (approx. $2,607.56 USD) for his release. Such allegations are not unusual, as demonstrated by an online Twitter campaign, labeled #EndSARS, in which numerous Nigerians recounted their personal experiences with SARS. These allegations were serious enough that the Inspector General of Police (IGP) recently released an order to dissolve SARS altogether.

One might reasonably suppose that this dissolution order will result in the elimination of SARS and the corrupt practices that pervaded its department. However, such conclusion would be incorrect, or at least premature, for a couple of reasons. First, the dissolution may turn out to be little more than a publicity gambit that does not have lasting effect. This most recent order is actually the fourth IGP order in four years that has sought to restrict, reorganize, or ban SARS’ operations. In the previous three directives the restrictions were not implemented, and the current order may not be either. Second, even if SARS is dissolved, the root causes of the corruption that pervaded its units are not unique to SARS. If left unaddressed, those same underlying causes can be expected to give rise to similar sorts of extortive corruption in other police units.

So, what factors contributed to the widespread corrupt practices within SARS? Part of the problem may be general systematic inadequacies—factors that contribute to corruption throughout the Nigerian government—but we can also identify three specific factors that made SARS particularly prone to extortive corruption. Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Coalition for Integrity’s New SWAMP Index Highlights Progress and Shortcomings in U.S. State Ethics Systems

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Today’s guest post is by Shruti Shah and Alex Amico, respectively President and Legal Fellow at the Coalition for Integrity, a civil society advocacy organization focused on corruption in the United States.

The unprecedented health crisis has demonstrated yet again the importance of strong ethics and transparency laws—not only on the national level, but at the sub-national level as well. In the United States, citizens are looking to their state legislators and governors to provide leadership, even as the large sums of government being spent on the pandemic response raise concerns about corruption and self-dealing. It is essential for the public to have confidence that public officials will adhere to the highest standards of ethics and integrity. One way to ensure this is with a strong state-level framework for ethics laws. To improve our understanding of the existing frameworks, and to highlight priority areas for improvement, the Coalition for Integrity recently released the second edition of the States With Anti-corruption Measures for Public employees (S.W.A.M.P.) Index. This report updates and expands on our 2018 report, with two new questions to better reflect the state of ethics regimes. Continue reading →