Tag Archives: KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast

New Podcast, Featuring Asoka Obeysekere

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, I interview Asoka Obeysekere, the Executive Director for Transparency International’s Sri Lanka chapter (TI-SL). Our conversation covers TI-SL’s various approaches to combating corruption in Sri Lanka, including both “retail” legal aid efforts to assist individual citizens in dealing with corrupt bureaucrats, as well as efforts to secure broader legal and institutional reforms, as well as broader cultural change. On that latter subject, the interview also covers the system of corruption in Sri Lanka, how corruption has become normalized, and whether an dhow attitudes about corruption can be changed. We also discuss how TI-SL, drawing inspiration from a civil society initiative in Ukraie, has compiled its own registry of Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) using publicly available, and how the creation of such a database can be helpful in detecting suspicious activity and exposing potential wrongdoing. The interview concludes with the advice Mr. Obeysekere would offer to other civil society leaders operating in similarly challenging environments on how they can be most effective in advancing an anticorruption agenda.

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.

New Podcast, Featuring Irio Musskopf

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, my collaborators Nils Köbis and Christopher Starke interview Irio Musskopf, a Brazilian software engineer who co-founded and developed an open-data anticorruption project called Operation “Serenata de Amor, which uses artificial intelligence algorithms to analyze publicly available data to identify and publicize information about suspicious cases involving potential misappropriation of public money. Mr. Musskopf discusses the background of the project,the basic statistical approach to detecting suspicious spending patterns,the reasons for relying exclusively on public data (even when offered access to non-public information), and some of the challenges the project team has encountered. The conversation also discusses more general questions regarding the role that intelligent algorithms can play in anticorruption efforts, including questions about whether and where such algorithms might be able to supplant human analysis, and when human decision-making will remain essential..

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.

New Podcast, Featuring Robert Manzanares

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, I interview Robert Manzanares, who served for many years as a Special Agent with Homeland Security Investigations, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that investigates a variety of federal laws dealing with cross-border criminal activity. Though Mr. Manzanares worked on a wide variety of fraud and corruption cases during his career at HSI, he is best known in the anticorruption community for his role as the lead agent in the case that ultimately lead to the seizure of substantial illegally-acquired assets of Teodorin Obiang, the Vice President of Equatorial Guinea and the son of Equatorial Guinea’s president, Teodoro Obiang. Much of our conversation focuses on that case, including the background on how HSI and Mr. Manzanares got involved in the case, some of the challenges that the investigators faced, and the broader significance of this case for the fight against global kleptocracy. We also use our discussion of that case to explore some broader issues, including the question of why it makes sense for the U.S. government to prioritize these cases, what can or should be done to target the Western individuals and firms that facilitate misconduct like Obiang’s, and what to do with seized assets in settings where the corrupt actors are still in power in their home countries.

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.

New Podcast, Featuring Sarah Steingrüber

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, I interview Sarah Steingrüber, an independent consultant on corruption and public health issues. Among her other activities in this area, she currently serves as the global health lead for the CurbingCorruption web platform, and was the co-author of the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre’s report on Corruption in the Time of COVID-19: A Double-Threat for Low Income Countries. Much of our conversation naturally focuses on how corruption and related issues may intersect with the coronavirus pandemic and its response, in particular (1) misappropriation of relief spending, and (2) how some corrupt leaders may use the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext to eliminate checks and oversight. A central tension we discuss is how the urgency of emergency situations affects the sorts of measures that are appropriate, and draws on lessons from prior health crises such as the Ebola outbreak in West African in 2013-2016. We then discuss other more general issues related to corruption and health, such as how the monetization and privatization of health may contribute to undue private influence on decision-making processes in the health sector.

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.

New Podcast, Featuring Samuel Power

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, my collaborator Christopher Starke interviews Samuel Power, a Lecturer in Corruption Analysis at the University of Sussex, about his research on the relationship between political party financing and corruption. The conversation focuses on his comparative research on political funding in Denmark and the United Kingdom, as well as several related topics, including the corruption risks associated with social media  and also touches on his more recent work on social media advertising by political parties.

You can find links to this episode on various platforms 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.

New Podcast–Part 2 of Interview with Mushtaq Khan and Paul Heywood

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. This week’s episode is the second part of the two-part interview that my collaborators Nils Köbis and Christopher Starke conducted with Professor Mushtaq Khan and Professor Paul Heywood (both of whom, in addition to their academic work, serve as programme directors for the “Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme” (ACE) sponsored by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID)). In this episode, Professors Khan and Heywood discuss a range of topics, including the role of social norms in corruption/anticorruption, the kinds of research we need (and don’t need) more of, the role of new technologies (blockchain, digitization, etc.) in fighting corruption, measurement challenges, and the role of corruption in populist narratives.

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.

 

New Podcast, Featuring Taryn Vian

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. This episode is particularly timely, as it features an interview with Taryn Vian, a professor at the University of San Francisco whose research focuses on the links between corruption and public health. Unsurprisingly, much of our discussion revolves around the current coronavirus pandemic, and how to address and manage the corruption challenges associated with the current health emergency. But our broad-ranging conversation also covers the corruption-health connection in more normal times (including issues like informal payments to doctors and embezzlement or misappropriation of medical supplies), as well as lessons learned from corruption in previous public health emergencies, such as the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2013-2016.

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.

New Podcast, Featuring Mushtaq Khan and Paul Heywood

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In all the chaos of last week’s COVID-19 developments, I neglected to announce that a new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is was published back on March 22. In this episode, the first in a two-part series, my collaborators Nils Köbis and Christopher Starke, sit down with Professor Mushtaq Khan and Professor Paul Heywood to discuss a variety of topics, including the complexities of the relationship between corruption and development and the “Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme” (ACE), an initiative sponsored by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) to strengthen the knowledge base for anticorruption initiatives. Professors Khan and Heywood are both ACE programme directors, and they describe the philosophy and core themes of the ACE project, and some of its work so far. The conversation also discusses more generally critiques of traditional approaches to anticorruption in developing countries, and alternative approaches and perspectives.

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.

New Podcast, Featuring Doron Navot

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, my collaborator Ina Kubbe, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Tel Aviv, interviews Professor Doron Navot, of the University of Haifa political science department. Much of the interview focuses on corruption in Israel, especially the allegations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and how these allegations have affected Israeli politics and society. The interview also covers broader themes related to corruption in Israel, including widespread “informal” practices that bleed over into illegal exchanges or favoritism. The interview concludes with a discussion about different forms of corruption their relative frequency in Israel, and what can be learned from Israeli anticorruption efforts.

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast 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.

New Podcast, Featuring Roberto de Michele and Francesco De Simone

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. This episode features my interview with Roberto de Michele and Francesco De Simone, who work as work in the state modernization specialists at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). In our conversation, we discuss the work that the IDB does on anticorruption, transparency, and related issues, and also how the IDB (or any other entity working in this area) can assess the impact of its projects. We further discuss the relationship between grand and petty corruption, and closely associated questions concerning incremental versus disruptive anticorruption reform strategies. (This discussion includes some discussions of the recommendations of the report prepared by an outside expert advisory group commissioned by the IDB, which Rick discussed shortly after it came out.) Toward the end of the interview, we talk about the impact that scholarly research has had on Roberto and Francesco’s thinking on anticorruption-related topics, and we conclude the interview with a discussion of the current state of corruption in the Americas–considering both the optimistic and pessimistic views of where things are going in the region.

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast 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.