Tag Archives: United States

Guest Post: Toward Global Standards for Defense Sector Governance

Posted on by
3

Amira El-Sayed, Program Manager for Transparency International’s Responsible Defence Governance program, contributes today’s guest post:

The governance of military power presents one of the great global challenges of our age. The defense sector is large, powerful, and secretive, and for those reasons especially vulnerable to corruption. In many countries, small groups of elites divert defense resources for personal enrichment, which can create risks to a state’s stability and security. Perhaps ever more troubling, in many countries powerful militaries run vast and secretive business empires exempt from oversight. Some of these businesses, such as resource extraction, are nominally legal, but militaries are often enmeshed with illegal activities like the trafficking of drugs, arms, and people. This too threatens state security, in at least two ways. First, poorly governed, corrupt militaries may be unable to respond effectively to genuine national security threats. Second, when the military uses its power to secure economic advantages for elites, this may contribute to the public resentment and frustration that can fuel violent extremist movements.

Improving governance in the defense sector is especially challenging. Defense sectors have historically hidden behind an “exceptional” status that has been used to stymie governance reform, with “national security” invoked as a sweeping justification to evade legitimate scrutiny from independent institutions and experts, such as auditors, anticorruption institutions, and civil society organizations. And this is not just an issue in authoritarian states: even in democracies, militaries are often exempted from meaningful oversight by parliamentary committees, judiciaries, audit offices, and anticorruption bodies, even as oversight by those bodies expands in other areas. While the need for secrecy may well be more pressing with respect to certain aspects of military and defense policy, the exemption of the defense sector from meaningful scrutiny is often overbroad, unjustified, and used to mask corruption, misuse of resources, and incompetence.

So how do you address one of the most complex challenges in governance, in a sector that has been exceptionally secretive, opaque, and impenetrable? Some of the work has to be done at the national level in individual countries, tailored to the each country’s specific circumstances. (There are many examples of such work by Transparency International (TI) and other civil society organizations. For instance, in Ukraine TI worked to establish high-level defense anticorruption committee called NAKO, and in Nigeria TI worked with the Air Force to take examine its governance structures and anticorruption systems.) But what about global standards, along the lines of what has been developed in other areas, like human rights and labor? Here there appears to be a significant gap. True, some security-related instruments do provide some principles for state/military behavior in specific areas, such as the OCSE Code of Conduct, UN Arms Trade Treaty, the NATO Building Integrity Programme, and the Tshwane Principles. And some of the general anticorruption or governance-related instruments, such as the UN Convention Against Corruption and Open Government Partnership, have some limited applications to the defense sector. But none of these instruments offers a comprehensive global approach to defense governance.

To fill this gap, TI is launching an initiative to formulate, formalize, and promote a set of global principles that underpin responsible, accountable governance of military power—principles that would embrace the idea that the military must be accountable to the people and that would, if followed, improve domestic governance of the defense sector. That is, TI is working with national governments, other civil society organizations, and the international community to develop Global Standards for Responsible Defense Governance, embodied in a Declaration on the Responsible Governance of Military Power. Continue reading →

Is the West Being Too Critical of Corruption in Ukraine? The Debate Continues

Posted on by
Reply

A couple weeks back I posted a commentary on an interesting debate over the West’s approach to promoting anticorruption in Ukraine. On the one side, Adrian Karatnycky (the Managing Partner of a consulting firm that assists international clients with government relations in Ukraine) and Alexander Motyl (Professor of Political Science at Rutgers) published a piece arguing that the West’s approach to promoting anticorruption was misguided, for two reasons: First, because (according to the authors) there was too much focus on punishing individual wrongdoers rather than on institutional reform, and second because the emphasis on the failings of the Ukrainian government (and the wrongdoing of individual Ukrainian officials) was undermining a reformist government, and would likely lead Ukrainian voters to embrace populist demagogues. On the other side, Daria Kaleniuk (the executive director of a Ukrainian civil society organization called the Anti-Corruption Action Center) countered that the only reason the Ukrainian government has made any progress on anticorruption reforms is because of pressure from the West, and that holding individual wrongdoers accountable is essential to making progress on this issue and restoring the faith of the Ukrainian people in the institutions of government.

My own take was that Ms. Kaleniuk is likely correct that individual accountability, though not sufficient, is a necessary component of an effective anticorruption strategy; Karatnycky and Motyl’s implicit argument that Ukraine could make headway on the corruption problem without an effective system for holding individual wrongdoers accountable, as long as the country pursues “institutional reforms” (like privatization and de-monopolization), struck me as both facially implausible and inconsistent with what we know about successful anticorruption reforms elsewhere. Karatnycky and Motyl’s second point, about “messaging,” struck me as harder. On the one hand, it’s true that emphasizing only problems and failures and shortcomings might breed cynicism, frustration, and possibly political instability. But on the other hand, exposing corruption may be the only way (or at least the most effective way) to mobilize public opinion to address some very real problems.

I probably wouldn’t have returned to this topic (about which, I can’t repeat enough, I lack genuine expertise), but Mr. Karatnycky and Professor Motyl published a rejoinder to Ms. Kaleniuk last week that I think merits further commentary. The new piece makes a number of separate points, and I won’t touch on all of them. But if I had to sum up their central argument, it would go like this:

Don’t be too critical of the ruling elites—even if those elites are pretty corrupt, and even if the only reason they’ve done much of anything about corruption in the past is because they’ve been pressured or shamed or coerced into doing so. If you’re too mean to them, they might lose the support of the people—and what comes next might be much worse.

That summary, which I admit is a bit of a caricature, might seem unfair. But I don’t think it is. Indeed, I not only think it’s an accurate distillation of Karatnycky and Motyl’s main argument, but I actually think that it’s an argument worth taking seriously, and in some circumstances might even be right. But I’m skeptical it’s right in most cases, and I remain to be convinced that it’s right about Ukraine. Under most conditions, I think it’s probably wrongheaded and dangerous to say that we shouldn’t criticize a government for failing to tackle corruption or try to expose the corruption of individual politicians out of a concern that doing so might undermine the legitimacy of the government.

So, before I proceed, let me make clear that my caricature—“Don’t say mean things about the kinda-corrupt-but-kinda-reformist incumbents”—really is a fair distillation of the argument. Here the key passages from Karatnycky and Motyl’s most recent piece: Continue reading →

Congress Should Act to Make US Aid to Ukraine Contingent on Anticorruption Reform

Posted on by
Reply

Since the Maidan Revolution removed former President Yanukovych from power in 2014, anticorruption progress in Ukraine has been uneven at best. Ukraine passed important anticorruption legislation in 2015, yet implementing it has been a challenge. Progress in some areas, including the judiciary and prosecutors’ offices, have met with significant and growing resistance. Many reformers within the government have resigned. For what it’s worth, Ukraine’s Corruption Perceptions Index score has only marginally improved. Still, there has been some progress. A significant portion of Ukraine’s budget is comprised of foreign aid, and donors—who have little patience for having their money stolen or wasted—have pressed the Ukrainian government to take the fight against corruption more seriously. The biggest anticorruption reforms have therefore been the ones on which large donors made their aid contingent.

The United States is one of the most important of these donors. The U.S. sends billions in loan guarantees, military aid, development aid, and State Department spending to Ukraine. During the Obama administration, anticorruption, and political reform more generally, was a high priority for the U.S. in its relationship with the post-Maidan Ukrainian government. Former Vice President Biden emphasized anticorruption during his five visits to Ukraine, and put personal pressure on President Poroshenko to follow through on his commitments in that area. Biden also played a role in delaying one billion dollars in loan guarantees to Ukraine due to corruption concerns—an approach the IMF has also embraced. But the anticorruption strings that the U.S. had attached to foreign aid in the past were imposed as a matter of executive discretion rather than legislative obligation.

Under the Trump administration, perhaps unsurprisingly, ensuring that Ukraine follows through on its anticorruption reforms has not been a foreign policy priority. No highly visible person in the current administration has taken on Biden’s conspicuous role in ensuring Kyiv follows through on its Minsk commitments. If President Trump isn’t willing to use U.S. leverage to continue to push for anticorruption efforts in Ukraine, the U.S. Congress can and should step in by putting anticorruption conditions on at least some American spending in Ukraine.  Continue reading →

The Debate Over Public UBO Registries Continues: A Response to Kenney and Cook

Posted on by
1

As our regular readers know, over the past few weeks GAB has had the opportunity to host on what is shaping up to be a lively and interesting debate over the advantages and disadvantages of creating public registries of the ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs) of companies and other legal entities. A UBO, for those not familiar with the lingo, is the real-live flesh-and-blood human being who has a sufficiently strong direct or indirect ownership interest in a company to be considered the “true” owner. Increasing UBO transparency is a top priority for many civil society activists, who argue that anonymous company ownership facilitates grand corruption, as well as money laundering, tax evasion, and other harmful activities. In many jurisdictions, UBO information is not available, and even law enforcement may have difficulty determining a company’s true owners. In other jurisdictions, companies must submit and update validated UBO information to the authorities, but that information is confidential, available only to law enforcement or other regulatory agencies in the context of an investigation, or perhaps to others in a limited set of circumstances (for example, banks performing customer due diligence). Most anticorruption advocates, as well as law enforcement agencies and most experts, agree that a confidential UBO registry is far superior to having no registry at all. The harder question, and the one we’ve been debating here at GAB, concerns whether the UBO registry should be public, so that anyone—not just law enforcement agencies acting pursuant to an investigation—can examine the registry to see who owns what.

The most recent round of discussion and debate was triggered when the UK—one of the few major economies that has implemented a public UBO registry—decided to require the 14 British Overseas Territories, such as the British Virgin Islands (BVI)—to create and maintain public UBO registries. Many in the civil society community celebrated this as a huge triumph, but others denounced the UK’s decision. The denunciation that got the debate going over here at GAB was a provocative piece by Martin Kenney, a BVI asset recovery lawyer, on the FCPA Blog. Mr. Kenney’s piece prompted replies from GAB Senior Contributor Rick Messick (here) and from me (here). Then last week, we were able to publish two more pieces, one from Mr. Kenney and another from Geoff Cook (the CEO of Jersey Finance). Both Mr. Kenney and Mr. Cook took issue with some or all of the arguments that Rick and I advanced, and pressed the claim that the UK’s imposition of public UBO registries on the Overseas Territories was a bad mistake.

Both of their pieces raise important points that deserve a reply. For that reason, and because I think that this issue is important enough that continuing this exchange on GAB for another round or two may be worthwhile for our readership, in this post I’m going to offer a response to Mr. Kenney’s and Mr. Cook’s posts. To lead with the conclusion: While I respect their experience and expertise in these matters, I found most of their arguments unconvincing, or at the very least in need of further explanation before I’m ready to reconsider my (admittedly tentative) view that public UBO registries have sufficient advantages over confidential UBO registries that moving from the latter to the former is desirable. Continue reading →

What Chinese Cuisine and Deferred Prosecution Agreements Have in Common

Posted on by
4

As Kees noted Monday, the use of American-style deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) to resolve corporate corruption cases short of trial is on the rise.  The United Kingdom, France, Argentina, and most recently Singapore now permit prosecutors to suspend or even drop altogether the prosecution of a firm for a corruption offense in return for the accused firm paying a fine, adopting measures to prevent future offenses, and cooperating with ongoing investigations.  Australia and Canada are on the verge of approving DPAs, and influential voices in India and Indonesia are urging their adoption too.

Apostles say DPAs allow governments to realize the benefits of a criminal conviction without the need for a lengthy, expensive, arduous trial against a well-funded corporate defendant where defeat is always a risk.  Former U.K. Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith told a New Delhi audience last October that once India begins using DPAS, companies would start coming forward and admit wrongdoing.  During the recent debate in Singapore one commentator observed that DPAs “provide an incentive to corporate entities to confront criminal conduct within their ranks,” and a group of Indonesian professors claim DPAs will be particularly valuable in their country.   In Indonesia, conviction of a corporation provides no assurance the defendant will not commit the same offense again while, they write, a DPA does.

DPA evangelists are about to learn what DPAs have in common with Chinese cuisine.  The first-time visitor to China soon discovers that Chinese food in China is unlike Chinese food at home.  Beef broccoli tastes much different outside China than in. Connoisseurs of DPAs will shortly find that what American prosecutors are able to cook up looks much different when prepared abroad.     Continue reading →

Can U.S. History Teach Us Anything Useful About the Fight Against Corruption in the Developing World Today?

Posted on by
Reply

A little while back I attended a very interesting talk by California Supreme Court Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuellar about a paper of his, co-authored with the political scientists Margaret Levi and Barry Weingast, entitled “Conflict, Institutions, and Public Law: Reflections on Twentieth-Century America as a Developing Country.” It’s a short, provocative paper, well worth reading for a number of reasons, but what I really want to focus on here is less the substance of the paper itself than the broader theme, captured by the paper’s subtitle, that it may be valuable to think about the pre-World War II United States as not so different from modern developing countries. Most relevant for readers of this blog, it may be worth looking to U.S. history (and the history of other developed countries) to better understand the process by which endemic public corruption may be brought under control.

The Cuellar-Levi-Weingast paper itself touches on, but doesn’t really delve into, this issue. Nonetheless, it got me thinking about three features of the historical U.S. struggle against systemic corruption—a struggle that, while certainly not complete, does appear to have successfully transformed the United States from a system where corruption was the norm (with some happy exceptions) to one where integrity is the norm (with some unhappy exceptions). Importantly, each of these three observations casts doubt on prominent claims in the modern debate about fighting corruption in the developing world: Continue reading →

The Role of Judicial Oversight in DPA Regimes: Rejecting a One-Size-Fits-All Approach

Posted on by
3

IIn late March 2018, the Canadian government released a backgrounder entitled Remediation Agreements and Orders to Address Corporate Crime that outlines the contours of a proposed Canadian deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) regime. DPAs—also appearing in slightly different forms such as non-prosecution agreements (NPAs) or leniency agreements—are pre-indictment diversionary settlements in which offenders (almost exclusively corporations) agree to make certain factual admissions, pay fines or other penalties, and in some cases assume other obligations (such as reforming internal compliance systems or retaining an external corporate monitor), and in return the government assures the corporation that it will drop the case after a period of time (ordinarily a few years) if the conditions specified in the agreement are met. Such agreements inhabit a middle ground between declinations (where the government declines to file any charges, but where companies still might forfeit money) and plea agreements (which require guilty pleas to criminal charges filed in court).

While Canada has been flirting with the idea of introducing DPAs for over ten years, several other countries have recently adopted, or are actively considering, deferred prosecution programs. France formally added DPAs (known in France as “public interest judicial agreements”) in December 2016, and entered into its first agreement, with HSBC Private Bank Suisse SA, in November 2017. In March 2018, Singapore’s Parliament installed a DPA framework by amending its Criminal Procedure Code. And debate is underway in the Australian parliament on a bill that would introduce a DPA regime for offenses committed by corporations.

The effect of DPAs in the fight against corruption, pro and con, has been previously debated on this blog. One critical design component of any DPA regime is the degree of judicial involvement. On one end of the spectrum is the United States, where courts merely serve as repositories for agreements at the end of negotiations and have no role in weighing the terms of any deal. On the other end of the spectrum is the United Kingdom, where a judge must agree that negotiations are “in the interests of justice” while they are underway, and a judge must declare that the final terms of any DPA are “fair, reasonable, and proportionate.” British courts also play an ongoing supervisory role post-approval, with the ability to approve amendments to settlement terms, terminate agreements upon a determined breach, and close the prosecution once the term of the DPA expires.

Under Canada’s proposed system of Remediation Agreements, each agreement would require final approval from a judge, who would certify that 1) the agreement is “in the public interest” and 2) the “terms of the agreement are fair, reasonable and proportionate.” While the test used by Canadian judges appears to parallel the U.K. model—including using some identical language—the up-or-down judicial approval would occur only once negotiations have been concluded. This stands in contrast to the U.K. model mandating direct judicial involvement over the course of the negotiation process.

The decision by the Canadian government to chart a middle course on judicial oversight is all the more notable given that an initial report released by the Canadian government following a several-month public consultation regarding the introduction of DPAs appeared to endorse the U.K. approach, noting that the majority of commenters who submitted views “favoured the U.K. model, which provides for strong judicial oversight throughout the DPA process.” Moreover, commentators have generally praised the U.K. model’s greater role for judicial oversight of settlements, especially judicial scrutiny of the parties charged (or not) in any given case, the evidence (or lack thereof), and the “fairness” (or not) of any proposed deal.

Despite these positions, one should not reflexively view the judicial oversight regime outlined in Canada’s latest report as a half-measure. Perhaps the U.K. model would be better for Canada, or for many of the other countries considering the adoption or reform of the DPA mechanism. But the superiority of the U.K. approach can’t be assumed, as more judicial involvement is not categorically better. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach favoring heightened judicial oversight, there are several factors that countries might consider when deciding on the appropriate form and degree of judicial involvement in DPA regimes: Continue reading →