Tag Archives: Politics

Looking Where They Shouldn’t: China’s Crackdown on Due Diligence Investigators

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As Meng suggested in a recent post, there is something admirable about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s anticorruption crusade. With nearly 182,000 party members reprimanded during his first 18 months in office, President Xi’s program appears both more ambitious and enduring than those of his predecessors. Unfortunately, though, the core of corruption surrounding China’s senior leadership remains largely untouchable. Even as China cracks down on the abusive practices of low-level officials, billions of dollars in “suspicious” funds sit in the foreign accounts of that nation’s “princelings,” protected by the fact that, as Matthew notes, discussion of the corruption of China’s senior leaders remains “absolutely taboo.” After all, shedding too much light on the misbehavior of the nation’s elite threatens to defeat the leadership’s paramount concern: maintaining the legitimacy that undergirds China’s political stability. And this leads to what it is that positive accounts of President Xi’s battle against corruption often overlook: the contemporaneous willingness of China’s senior leaders to crack down on anticorruption efforts whenever those efforts threaten to step on the wrong political toes.

One of the best examples of this phenomenon is the Chinese government’s recent crackdown on investigative companies who perform due diligence. Continue reading →

Lessons from Europe for India’s Anticorruption Party

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Last December, a year-old political party formed by anticorruption activists came to power in India’s capital, after a startling debut performance in Delhi’s local assembly elections. Within days, the new government, led by a former tax man named Arvind Kejriwal, announced a series of anti-graft investigations. Only 49 days into its term, however, Kejriwal and his colleagues resigned, ostensibly because their minority government could not push through an anticorruption bill. The party now has its eyes set on India’s parliamentary elections, set to occur this May.

Much has been written about India’s mercurial Aam Aadmi (“Common Man”) Party (AAP): its origins, its dedicated volunteers, its transparent campaign finance procedures, its vague policies regarding anything but corruption, and its missteps (some of which Russel Stamets discusses in a useful recent post on the FCPA Blog). Despite this, there has been little discussion regarding AAP’s place as a single-issue party in India’s deeply fractured political landscape, and little attempt to draw lessons from the successes and failures of anticorruption parties in other parts of the world.  Yet the experience of anticorruption parties in Central and Eastern Europe–as documented and analyzed by Andreas Bågenholm –offers both hope and important lessons to AAP and its supporters. Continue reading →

Are the Thai Anticorruption Agency’s Charges against the PM Politically Rash or Politically Shrewd?

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In my last post, I discussed the recent charges brought by Thailand’s National Anti-Corruption Committee (NACC) against the current Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, for failing to prevent corruption in the Thai government’s controversial (and recently discontinued) rice purchasing program. There are a few respects in which this case raises important questions not just for Thailand, but for anticorruption enforcement more generally. One, which I discussed last time, is the fact that the NACC has charged the Prime Minister not with engaging in corruption, but with (criminally) failing to prevent corruption. Another concerns how the NACC is managing – or failing to manage – the delicate and difficult politics of bringing charges against a sitting Prime Minister in the midst of ongoing political turmoil, in which the Prime Minister and her party remain very popular with much of the nation — and would almost certainly would have won the election that opposition protesters effectively blocked. My educated guess is that if you were to ask members of the NACC how the political situation affected their decision-making, they would say that it had no effect at all – they simply followed the evidence where it took them, without fear or favor. This is what anticorruption enforcement officials always say, at least publicly. I suspect they may actually believe it, and perhaps it’s (sometimes) true. But anticorruption enforcers operating in politically difficult environments often do, and often should, think carefully and strategically about the constraints and opportunities those environments create – Gabriel Kuris’s studies of the Indonesian KPK (here and here) provide nice evidence of that.

So, was the NACC’s decision to bring these charges against the Prime Minister at this moment a politically rash decision, or a politically shrewd one? It’s easier to make the case for “rash”, but at the risk of revealing my ignorance of Thai politics (or my ignorance more generally), I’m going to make a tentative case for “shrewd”. Continue reading →