Tag Archives: nepotism

Anticorruption Strategies for Small Population Countries

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As I discussed in a prior post, countries with very small populations face distinct challenges when it comes to detecting and fighting corruption. In places where everyone knows everyone, personal ties between decision-makers and stakeholders are practically unavoidable. This not only makes it more difficult to avoid conflicts of interest, but also fosters a culture of informality that may inhibit efforts to impose stricter procedures and requirements for public decision-making. Furthermore, in small, close-knit communities it is harder to ensure anonymity of whistleblowers, and to detect corruption that takes the form of inappropriate long-term reciprocity rather than explicit quid pro quo exchanges.

The distinct challenges posed by corruption in small populations may call for distinct solutions. While there may not be any single solution to these challenges, there are a few approaches that may help:

  • Calling corruption by its name: When a person in a position of public trust prioritizes particular familial or social loyalties over those owed to the public, she is engaged in a form of corruption—abusing her entrusted power to benefit her friends and family. But such corruption may be perceived as benign or even salutary when it takes place in a community characterized by a high degree of close familial and social ties. The fact that these corrupt relationships often do not involve exchange of money may further help to camouflage them as a social interactions rather than as transactions involving the abuse of public trust. Unless corruption is identified and perceived as such, no anticorruption effort is going to succeed. Therefore, there needs to be constant and systematic education within the community to raise awareness about the causes and manifestations of kinship corruption, as well as the harms caused by it, in order to de-normalize this form of corruption (see here, here and here).
  • Leveraging the power of public opinion: In tight-knit communities, informal social sanctions (social exclusion, ostracism, and stigmatization) may be much more powerful in these communities and can be a meaningful constraint on corruption (see here). This is, of course, a double-edged sword: As noted above, unless kinship corruption is recognized as such, those involved are unlikely to be shamed by their peers and may actually be socially punished if they decline to do favors for friends and family. Similarly, social pressure can be used to reinforce clientelism and nepotism (see here and here). But anticorruption reformers can and should try to find ways to leverage the power of shaming, and other social sanctions, to promote integrity.
  • Depersonalize decision-making: As noted above, in small communities, it is harder to enforce the sorts of strict conflict of interest rules that are feasible in larger communities. Furthermore, even where there is no “formal” conflict of interest, in small countries there is an increased likelihood that public decisionmakers will have personal relationships or connections with some of the people who would be affected by their decisions. In a hiring process, for example, those responsible for the hiring will very often have some connection with at least one of the applicants. Therefore, small-population countries should place an even greater emphasis on removing the personal element as much as possible. For example, anonymizing administrative procedures and implementing “blind” decision making not only makes nepotism and clientelism harder, but also reduces the risk of unconscious bias (see here and here).
  • International assistance: Another, potentially more controversial way for small countries to overcome the inherent difficulties in aggressively applying anticorruption laws within a close-knit community is to seek the assistance of the international community, for example by relying more heavily on international assistance to fight corruption. This is not only because outsiders may be less likely to have conflicts of interest. It is also because small population countries may simply have fewer talented people to devote to any single matter, including anticorruption (see here and here). International assistance, for example in the form of manpower with suitable expertise, may help to alleviate such issues.

As we are often reminded, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to anticorruption, and it is also true that there is no one anticorruption recipe for all small countries. Nevertheless, when designing anticorruption strategies for very small jurisdictions, it is useful to recognize some of the common challenges that such jurisdictions face, and to design anticorruption strategies that leverage some of the advantages of smallness while ameliorating some of its drawbacks.

Where Everyone Knows Everyone: The Distinct Anticorruption Challenges of Small Population Countries

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Compared to most of the rest of the world, Iceland has a strong reputation as a clean country. In the most recent version of Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI), Iceland ranks in 14th place—quite impressive overall, though behind Iceland’s Nordic neighbors Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Yet Iceland’s high CPI score obscures a number of incidents over the last several years, where public officials in Iceland were involved in conduct that seems to raise concerns about potential conflicts of interest. Consider a few of the most high-profile examples:

  • In 2017, Iceland’s Minister of Justice was criticized in connection with the appointment of judges to the newly-established Court of Appeals. Notably, at least three of the fifteen judges appointed had personal ties to the Minister: one was a partner at a law firm where the Justice Minister had worked prior to her appointment, another was the spouse of a partner at the same law firm, and a third was the spouse of her fellow party member and colleague in parliament (see here and here).
  • In 2019, after revelations of allegations that a major Icelandic fishing company had been involved in bribing Namibian government officials (the so-called Fishrot scandal), demonstrators called for the resignation of the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. The reason was his connections to the company, where he had once served as chairman of the board, and his longtime personal friendship with the company’s CEO. Indeed, the Minister said publicly that his first reaction to the scandal had been to phone his CEO friend to ask him how he was feeling (see here, here and here).
  • In 2022, the Minister of Finance found himself in hot water after it became known that his own father was among a select few allowed to bid for valuable holdings in a state-owned bank (see here and here).
  • In December 2022, the Finance Committee of the Parliament proposed adding to the government’s budget a 100 million ISK grant (approximately US$ 727,000) to a media company, whose CEO was the sister-in-law of one of the committee members. (The proposal was promptly withdrawn when this was disclosed.)

To be clear, none of these incidents necessarily involves corruption. But they all raise concerns about potential conflicts of interest, and the appearance of impropriety. And while each of these incidents arose out of its own distinct set of circumstances, there is a common underlying factor that may have contributed to all of them, and that generally poses challenges to effectively preventing corruption and regulating conflicts of interest: Iceland is very small, with a population of only 370,000 people. Although Iceland is in many ways most similar—culturally and politically—to its larger Nordic neighbors, with respect to population size and the distinct anticorruption challenges it presents, Iceland may turn out to share some common features with other small-population jurisdictions, such as Belize, the Bahamas and Vanuatu. Consider some of the ways in which fighting corruption and conflict of interest may be more challenging—or at least pose different sorts of challenges—in very small countries: Continue reading →

In Mexico, Justice Will Remain a Family Matter

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Judicial corruption in Mexico is a pervasive problem. And while high-level scandals tend to grab the headlines (see, for example, here, here, and here), much of the corruption is more pedestrian. While the causes of Mexico’s judicial corruption problem are various and complex, one persistent contributing factor is the endemic nepotism throughout the judiciary.

Of the more than 50 types of position in the judicial branch (including both judgeships and various administrative positions), only two—federal circuit and district court judgeships—use a competitive merit-based hiring process. For the rest, judges can choose whom they please, with little oversight. Moreover, once hired, these individuals have an insurmountable advantage in promotion in the judiciary, given that most job postings (and, informally, judgeships) require that the candidate have previous experience in the judicial branch. And even with respect to circuit and district judgeships, which are supposed to be filled through an open and merit-based competitive selection process run by a body called the Federal Judicial Council (CJF), in practice the CJF often creates “special” vacancies with different criteria (in effect, lower standards).

As a result of all this, nepotism in judicial hiring and promotion is pervasive, as judges are able to secure positions for friends and family. At least 51% of Mexico’s judges and magistrates are related to someone else working in the judiciary, with that number as high as 80% in some states. (To take one particularly egregious but not totally anomalous example, in one judge’s chambers, 17 employees were related to the judge.) This nepotism is not only corrupt in itself, but it also contributes to other forms of corruption. For one thing, corrupt judges can appoint those who will participate in, or at least be complicit in, corrupt practices—in some cases appointing individuals recommended by organized crime groups. But even when such deliberate wrongdoing is not the issue, untrained or unprofessional judicial bureaucrats and judges are more susceptible to corruption, and more likely to create the kinds of delays and inefficiencies in the system that both invite and obscure corrupt actions.

There hadn’t been much appetite in the Mexican Government to address the judicial nepotism problem until reform-minded President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Chief Justice Arturo Zaldívar took office. Since February 2020, both men have been enthusiastically lobbying for a judicial reform package deemed the most ambitious since 1994. This bill, overwhelmingly passed by the Mexican Senate and Chamber of Deputies in recent months, is a behemoth, with a variety of significant structural changes to the judicial branch. Among these many reforms are several measures designed, at least in part, to address the problem of judicial nepotism: Continue reading →

Anticorruption Tools in the Anti-Trump Toolkit: A Primer

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[Kaitlin Beach provided helpful research and thoughtful contributions to this post.]

Since Donald Trump’s election, critics have asserted that his presidency presents unprecedented risks of corruption, cronyism, and conflict of interest. Many argue that President Trump and members of his administration are already engaging in conduct that is not only unethical, but also illegal. Because it can be hard for non-specialists to keep track of the myriad rules that have been referenced in the context, this post provides a brief, non-technical overview of the most important federal laws and regulations that are designed to prevent corruption, conflict-of-interest, and self-dealing in the U.S. government, focusing on those that have been most widely or most creatively discussed in relation to fighting a purportedly corrupt Trump administration.

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It’s Official: Hiring a Foreign Official’s Relative in Exchange for Business Violates the FCPA

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The U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) prohibits the entities it covers from corruptly offering “anything of value” to a foreign official for the purposes of obtaining or retaining business. In most cases, the “thing of value” offered is a traditional bribe—money, expensive gifts, lavish vacations, etc. But in some cases, firms do “favors” for foreign officials that are less direct, and do not conform quite so obviously to traditional notion of bribery. Making a generous donations to the official’s favorite charity is one example; another, which has become increasingly prominent in recent FCPA investigations—primarily in cases involving China—is preferential hiring of the relatives of the foreign officials in exchange for business opportunities. This issue got a lot of press particularly in connection with the SEC’s investigation of hiring practices at JP Morgan and other investment banks in China, but the issue is more pervasive.

These investigations raised an interesting legal question: Can providing a job or internship to the adult relative of a foreign official ever count as providing “anything of value” to the official him- or herself? To my mind, the answer is a clear yes, but not everyone agrees. Last year, Professor Andy Spalding and I engaged in a spirited and constructive debate on this question (see here, here, here, and here)—and though I think in the end our positions (mostly) converged, there was perhaps still some lingering doubt (though not in my mind) as to whether the U.S. government would or should adopt the view that offering a bribe to an official’s relative can count as offering something of value to the official.

That doubt has been laid to rest. In the BNY Mellon settlement from last August, the settlement document explicitly endorsed the view that the firm’s decision to provide internships to foreign officials’ relatives counted as providing “anything of value,” because “[t]he internships were valuable work experience, and the requesting family members derived significant personal value in being able to confer this benefit on their family members.” And last week, the SEC announced a settlement with Qualcomm regarding investigations into Qualcomm’s alleged FCPA violations in China; although the violations included more traditional bribes (such as lavish gifts, travel, and entertainment), the settlement focuses substantially on Qualcomm’s practice of hiring the relatives of Chinese officials (and executives at state-owned enterprises, who count as foreign officials for FCPA purposes) in exchange for favorable treatment—even when these candidates would not meet Qualcomm’s normal hiring standards.

As GAB readers know, I think that this view is legally correct, good policy, and entirely consistent with the DOJ and SEC’s past statements on this issue, including the FCPA Resource Guide (which admittedly doesn’t discuss this specific scenario explicitly). The recent settlements in BNY Mellon and Qualcomm do not, of course, have any bearing on whether I’m correct in those views. But insofar as there might have been any uncertainty about the U.S. government’s position, it has been eliminated. This is likely bad news for J.P. Morgan, but good news for the world. Why do I think it’s good news for the world? Three main reasons: Continue reading →