Tag Archives: Nigeria

Guest Post: An International Anticorruption Court Is Not a Utopian Dream or a Distraction

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Today’s guest post is from Richard Goldstone, a former Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa who also served as the first chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and Robert Rotberg, the President Emeritus of the World Peace Foundation and former professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

In a 2018 Daedalus article, Senior United States District Judge Mark L. Wolf explained that “The World Needs an International Anticorruption Court (IACC)” and charted a course for its creation. In a recent post on this blog, Professor Alex Whiting characterized the IACC as a “utopian” dream and possibly “a distraction from more effective responses to the worldwide scourge of grand corruption.” Notably absent from the post is a description of what the other effective responses to combating grand corruption might be.

In contrast to Professor Whiting, we found Judge Wolf’s original proposal for an IACC compelling. Therefore, we joined him in establishing Integrity Initiatives International (III). Continue reading →

How We Did It: the U.S. Congress’ Exposure of the Grand Scale of Global Corruption

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 Over the past two decades the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has laid bare how Gabonese President Omar Bongo, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Equatorial Guinean President Teodoro Obiang, and a gaggle of friends and relatives of the leaders of Mexico, Pakistan, Nigeria, Angola, Saudi Arabia, and other countries conspired with large, prestigious banks to hide the enormous sums they stole from their nation’s citizens.  Financial Exposure, the new book by subcommittee investigator and later staff director Elise Bean, recounts how Democrats and Republicans united not only to document egregious cases of grand corruption but to enact legislation making banks’ complicity in future cases a crime.

Americans depressed by the rancorous polarization now gripping Congress will find her book a welcome reminder that Democrats and Republicans can work together to advance the public interest.  Scandals involving money laundering by banks in other nations, most recently Denmark’s Danske Bank and Latvian bank ABLV, should prompt non-Americans to send their parliamentarians a copy of Ms Bean’s book.  Below Ms. Bean offers a few morsels from the book to whet readers’ appetites.    

There isn’t room here to recount all the subcommittee’s anti-corruption investigations, but a few examples will illustrate what they showed and what results they produced.

Citibank Private Bank.  Corruption was the subject of a key investigation by the subcommittee in 1999, which was led by then subcommittee chair Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine. Rumors were flying then that the United States had become the preferred banker for corrupt foreign officials around the world. Working with Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan (my boss), the subcommittee elected to zero in on so-called “private banks,” banking units that opened accounts only for wealthy individuals with at least $1 million in deposits.

The inquiry ended up detailing four accountholders at Citibank Private Bank: Raul Salinas, brother to the then president of Mexico; Omar Bongo, then president of Gabon; Asif Ali Zardari, then known for his marriage to Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister of Pakistan; and the sons of Sani Abacha, recently deceased president of Nigeria.  Senate hearings exposed how Citibank had not only accepted tens of millions of suspect dollars from the accountholders, but also created offshore shell companies to hide their identities, helped them secretly move millions of dollars around the globe, and continued servicing them even after learning of corruption allegations. Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Nigerian Foreign Minister’s Vilification of Switzerland and the Diplomacy of Asset Recovery

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Today’s guest post is from Dr. Matthew Ayibakuro,director of research and policy at the Africa Network for Environment & Economic Justice (ANEEJ).

On Tuesday, 11 September 2018, Nigeria’s Foreign Minister, Geoffrey Onyeama in a speech delivered at the opening of the 2nd International Conference on Combatting Illicit Financial Flows organized by the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption (PACAC), called out Switzerland for being an accessory to the looting of the country by the former Head of State, Sani Abacha.

He further decried the difficulties faced by Nigeria in repatriating the infamous Abacha loot from Swiss authorities, referring to the process as “daylight robbery”.  For stakeholders working on issues of asset recovery from Nigeria and in foreign jurisdictions, these comments give room for some concern.  The potential impact of statements like this in the short and long-term can impede the progress made by the asset recovery regime in Nigeria over the last couple of decades.  There are obvious reasons for this. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Towards an African Voice on Anticorruption

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Today’s guest post is from Selemani Kinyunyu, Senior Policy Officer for Political and Legal Matters at the African Union Advisory Board on Corruption. The views expressed in this post are his own.

The African Union (AU) has declared the year 2018 is the African Anti-Corruption Year, and the fight against corruption was a central focus of the 31st Summit of the AU, which was held this past July 1 and 2 in Mauritania. The Summit, along with other recent developments, have made clear that there is an emerging African voice on this issue, one that emphasizes certain issues of pressing importance and that articulates a distinctive perspective on these issues. The AU Summit in particular highlighted four notable issues: Continue reading →

Lights, Camera, Integrity? From “Naming and Shaming” to “Naming and Faming”

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“Can a reality TV show discourage corruption?” This was the recent attention-grabbing headline of an article in The Economist about Integrity Idol, the brainchild of the NGO Accountability Labs. It was started in Nepal in 2014, and has since spread to Pakistan, Mali, Liberia, Nigeria, and South Africa.

The format of the show is simple. Citizens are asked to nominate civil servants whom they believe display the highest standards of honesty and integrity. These nominations are then reviewed by a panel of judges comprising local and international experts, who select five finalists. Videos are then produced, each around 2-5 minutes long, containing excerpts from an interview with the finalists and their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates, along with glimpses into their work lives. (See here and here for examples). These videos are disseminated among the citizenry via traditional and non-traditional media. Citizens vote for their favorite, and the “Integrity Idol” is crowned.

This isn’t the first time a non-traditional cultural medium has been used to spread an anticorruption message. Other approaches, including museums, TV dramas, music, and poetry  have been discussed on this blog previously (see here, here, here and here). Thanks to Integrity Idol, reality TV can be added to the list. That might seem a bit surprising. Reality TV has a (deserved) reputation for depicting an over-dramatized, intentionally provocative, and often manipulated caricature of real life. One hopes that no one would cite Real Housewives of New York as a reliable source for understanding the lives of real housewives in New York! Integrity Idol is different: it is an intentional effort to draw attention to real stories of real people, and often the unaltered stories of these people are compelling in and of themselves. The vision of Accountability Labs and its founding director, Blair Glencorse, is to “support change-makers to develop and implement positive ideas for integrity in their communities, unleashing positive social and economic change.” Continue reading →

Fighting Corruption in Nigeria

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Nigeria continues to enjoy pride of place in the global discourse on corruption.  A Google search for “Nigeria corruption” brings up more than 53 million entries led by a lengthy Wikipedia article on the subject. Matthew’s bibliography lists over 100 books, monographs, and scholarly articles on corruption in the country which analyze everything from its colonial roots to how and why it is endemic to what can be done to tame it.  This blog has ruminated on matters ranging from why the head of the Economic and Financial Crime Commission was replaced to whether the then newly-elected President Muhammadu Buhari was serious about fighting corruption to outgoing First Lady Patience Jonathan’s impatience with the thought something was untoward in her receiving “small gifts” totaling $15 million while her husband held high office.

Two current papers by authors with very different backgrounds, one a former U.S. intelligence analyst, the other a former Nigerian professor and incoming head of the Nigeria’s corrupt practices commission, continue the discussion.   Both agree corruption is pervasive and that it has done much harm to the state and its citizens.  Not surprisingly perhaps, given who they are and where they sit, they offer quite different assessments of where the country stands in the fight against corruption.  In Real Challenges of Fighting Corruption in Nigeria, remarks delivered to the Corruption Hunters Network (CHN) June 25, Professor Bolaji Owasanoye, nominated to chair the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, radiated optimism, ticking off a series of reforms that have made a difference and predicting more progress is on the horizon.  By contrast, the tone of a July monograph for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace by Matthew Page, the former Nigerian analyst for the U.S. intelligence community, is decidedly pessimistic.  When it comes to what can be done, he offers nothing beyond a scheme to help policymakers make sense of the dizzying variety of forms corruption in the country takes.

My money is on Owasanoye and not just because I had the opportunity to hear him deliver his talk. My reasons for optimism about Nigeria’s fight against corruption are several. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Global Forum or Global Farce on Asset Recovery?

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GAB is delighted to welcome back Susan Hawley, Policy Director at Corruption Watch, to contribute today’s guest post:

The global record on recovering assets looted from public treasuries is not good. The World Bank and UNODC estimate that between $20-40 billion is stolen each year. Between 2006 and 2012, $2.6 billion stolen assets were frozen in so-called “destination” countries, and $423.5 million was returned. That means of the roughly $120 billion (taking the lowest end of the World Bank and UNODC’s estimate) thought to have been potentially looted globally in that 6 year period, only 0.3% was actually recovered.

To strengthen international efforts to combat this problem, the 2016 London Anti-Corruption Summit called for the creation of a Global Forum on Asset Recovery (GFAR); the World Bank and UNODC’s Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative organized the inaugural Global Forum on Asset Recovery (GFAR), in December 2017 in Washington, D.C., with the US and UK governments as co-hosts. The GFAR, which welcomed over 300 participants from 26 jurisdictions, focused on four countries: Nigeria, (thought to have to have lost $32 billion to corruption under previous President Goodluck Jonathan); Sri Lanka (where former President Rajapaksa allegedly stole up to $5.38 billion); Tunisia (where former ruler Ben Ali and his family are thought to have amassed wealth of over $13 billion); and Ukraine (where former president Yanukovych and his associates are thought to have stolen around $7.5 billion). These countries were selected for their political will to recover stolen assets and the considerable assets they have to recover.

The stated objectives for the GFAR were “progress on cases achieved by the four focus countries, increased capacity through technical sessions, renewed commitment to advancing asset recovery cases, and increased collaboration among involved jurisdictions.” As measured against these objectives, was the GFAR a success? Should it be a regular event? More generally, do asset recovery forums like this have sufficient positive impact to justify their cost? Continue reading →