Centre for the Study of Corruption

Michael Hornsby, Impact Manager at Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC) and David Szakonyi, ACDC co-founder, discuss the value that cross-sectoral collaborations might bring to complex, cross-border investigations into illicit financial flows and kleptocracy using leaked, commercial and public data sets. 

Picture the scene: you’re an investigative journalist and, out of the blue, a source offers you a treasure trove of data that exposes the inner workings of an opaque financial jurisdiction long suspected of enabling large-scale financial crime and corruption.  

Who would you call? 

For many journalists in this position, the answer has been an international media organisation with the ability to set up and coordinate collaboration across multiple newsrooms in multiple countries. This model has successfully underpinned many of the largest and most transformative cross-border collaborative investigations into offshore finance and corruption, such as the Panama Papers, Troika Laundromat and Pandora Papers. 

The involvement of diverse journalistic expertise from around the world helps to ensure that the most interesting and timely stories are extracted from the data. These massive collaborative projects have led to equally enormous impacts: toppling governments, sparking prosecutions, informing new sanctions, regulations, legislation and international frameworks, as well as catapulting the offshore world into the public consciousness.  

Despite this arguably successful track record, some journalists, like Frederik Obermaier, who together with Bastian Obermayer, received the Panama Papers and Pandora Papers (along with other high-profile leaks) have wondered how non-journalistic actors in the anti-corruption space, such as academics and civil society experts, can contribute to even greater impact by getting involved in collaborative investigations early on. 

New models for collaboration  

In November, the organisations behind two current Governance & Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence (GI ACE) projects, along with the National Endowment for Democracy, convened experts from across journalism, technology, policy and academia at a Data against Kleptocracy workshop held in London. Our discussion focused on how journalists and data-savvy social scientists can better collaborate to investigate illicit financial flows and kleptocracy using leaked, commercial and public data sets.    

For one of these GI ACE projects, our organisation, the Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC), is collaborating with the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF) to mine the 2021 Congo Hold-Up leak from BGFI Bank in the DRC for fresh insights. Journalists from 18 countries pored over this dataset – the largest ever leak of financial records from the African continent – and exposed how the DRC’s former President Joseph Kabila and his inner circle laundered millions of dollars through the bank. 

The initial results from this collaboration are helping to prove the concept that we set out to test when Frederik Obermaier and David founded ACDC in 2020, together with the anti-corruption policy expert Zoë Reiter. By applying the kinds of big data analysis that informs much of contemporary social science research, we have been able to generate insights which were not available during the original wave of Congo Hold-Up reporting. For instance, by identifying previously unrecognised companies as highly likely to have been involved in money laundering through BGFI’s branch in the DRC. 

Data science approaches further allow us to evaluate the effectiveness of international banks’ de-risking policies in reducing money laundering and the banks’ exposure to it. We are also able to determine whether whistleblower revelations changed attitudes and appetites toward risk at BGFI in the DRC.  

Reaching this stage of the collaboration has meant overcoming several challenges, many of which were familiar to participants in the London workshop: Journalists and academics work on different timelines, they ask different questions of the data in front of them, and their organisations have different understandings of the ethical and legal questions around public interest, privacy and data processing.  

However, this nascent mode of collaboration has already seen some stand-out successes.  

What can we learn from early success stories? 

Matthew Collin, an economist at the EU Tax Observatory who is part of our team for the Congo Hold-Up project, has analyzed publicly available data from the Cayman National Bank and Trust (Isle of Man) that was initially received by the journalist collective Distributed Denial of Secrets. His work produced three new discoveries, helping pull back the curtain on the potential level of wealth contained in offshore accounts, the frequency of politically exposed persons (PEPs) controlling these accounts, and the critical importance of shell companies in providing the opacity to make it all happen.  

Our colleagues in the current GI ACE cohort from University of Exeter, OCCRP and University of Oxford have launched a similarly ambitious project that taps over 50 terabytes of administrative and leaked datasets. By developing new tools to process such massive reams of information, they’re contributing not just to our academic understanding of the role of professional enablers in facilitating illicit financial flows around the world, but also creating real value for journalists working with similar data down the line. 

The discussion in London made it clear that individuals, organisations and institutions in this space need varied types of support in order to pursue more collaborations, whether they receive and archive leaks, coordinate investigations or conduct academic research. Many teams are facing the same thorny problems in analyzing these large datasets, and there was widespread interest in creating platforms and workshops to better communicate lessons learned.  

But there is also a mismatch between the wealth of data waiting to be analyzed and the resources available to teams to pilot potential ideas and make their cases to journalists. GI ACE is an exemplary example of a program providing much-needed support to projects such as ours so that we can demonstrate the importance of these types of cross-sector collaborations. 

Additionally, to achieve the added value promised by academic insights, it is  crucial to bring empirical findings to policy makers and practitioners to help underpin and drive effective action. This often falls outside of the normal practice of both academics and journalists, highlighting the important role of civil society organisations and impact-oriented partnerships in making the bridge to end users.  

This nascent community of interdisciplinary practitioners will continue learning from each other and we see a clear mandate for developing this collaborative work further. Our hope is that in the future, one of the first calls a journalist will make after receiving a leak might be to a university. 

Originally posted as a Governance & Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence (GI ACE) Programme blog.

Professor Robert Barrington applies the lens of corruption analysis to the Grenfell Inquiry report, asking whether prosecutions might be possible, and what the Inquiry tells us about the way in which the UK authorities address corruption. 

Back in July 2017, after Theresa May had announced that a public inquiry into the Grenfell tragedy, Transparency International (TI) wrote to the incoming head of the inquiry. The message was simple: “Although there is no evidence as yet that corruption has had a role to play, our experience from around the world is that there is a high risk that corruption will have played a role. This is certainly the perception of the public, and at very least this perception needs to be laid to rest. At worst, it is possible that corruption played a part in turning a small domestic fire into a very great tragedy“. TI proposed that corruption should specifically be included in the Grenfell Inquiry’s Terms of Reference. 

In the majority of countries in the world, one of the first questions to be asked in such a situation would be ‘who paid the bribes?’. This is because there is widespread recognition, backed by substantial evidence, that bribery is a common contributing factor to disasters. Two examples are: the Rana Plaza factory collapsing in Bangladesh, where public officials had been bribed to turn a blind eye to unsafe construction practices at a building that was fundamentally unsafe; and the Turkish earthquake, where bribery of officials had allowed sub-standard construction that meant the death toll in the earthquake was very much higher than it might otherwise have been. 

It is no coincidence that these examples both involve construction, which surveys across the world regularly pinpoint as one of the sectors with the highest levels of corruption. This is also in the case in the UK, where research shows that construction is the sector in which bribe-paying is most prevalent. 

Despite this, the UK has a very poor record of investigating corruption, even in public inquiries that are meant to be looking at it. The recent Tees Valley Review is a good example of how the UK is institutionally ill-equipped to spot corruption. There is a long-standing assumption that corruption is a problem that happens abroad but not within these shores. We have (unlike peer countries such as France and Australia) no anti-corruption agency. In the occasional surges of interest by the British government in tackling corruption, the activities are generally aimed at addressing corruption overseas and not corruption within the UK. 

Despite TI’s alert in 2017, corruption did not make it into the Grenfell Inquiry’s Terms of Reference (ToRs). Does this matter, when the report was so thorough and damning about so many things which were apparently much more core to the tragedy? Well, yes. Having corruption in the Inquiry’s ToRs would have mattered for two big reasons.

First, if you do not analyse the problem properly, it is much harder to find an appropriate solution. We still do not know if corruption was a factor at Grenfell, and therefore the anti-corruption solutions garnered from the last three decades of research, law enforcement and practical experience will not be applied.  

Second, there may be specific corruption-related offences that could be prosecuted under anti-corruption laws and which might not have been surfaced.  If you don’t look for it, you are less likely to find it. In the 1,700-odd pages of the report there is not a single mention of the words ‘bribe’, ‘bribery’, ‘corrupt’ or ‘corruption’. There is one lone mention [vol II, para 26.68] of a ‘corrupting’ influence, of which more below. Notwithstanding the notable absence of any analysis of corruption, the Grenfell Inquiry report did not pull its punches in other areas, which in themselves give some sense of where a corruption analyst might look with interest. For example:

• The Building Research Establishment (BRE) ‘held a trusted position within the construction industry […] However, from 1991 much of the work it carried out in relation to testing the fire safety of external walls was marred by unprofessional conduct, inadequate practices, a lack of effective oversight, poor reporting and a lack of scientific rigour’ [para 2.15]. ‘We saw evidence of a desire to accommodate existing customers and to retain its status within the industry at the expense of maintaining the rigour of its processes and considerations of public safety’ [para 2.18].
• The cladding materials companies were dishonest and colluded with the BRE: ‘One very significant reason why Grenfell Tower came to be clad in combustible materials was systematic dishonesty on the part of those who made and sold the rainscreen cladding panels and insulation products. They engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data and mislead the market. In the case of the principal insulation product used on Grenfell Tower, Celotex RS5000, the Building Research Establishment (BRE) was complicit in that strategy‘ [para 2.19].
• “The British Board of Agrément (BBA) is a commercial organisation that certifies the compliance of products with the requirements of legislation. The dishonest strategies of Arconic and Kingspan succeeded in a large measure due to the incompetence of the BBA, its failure to adhere robustly to the system of checks it had put in place, and an ingrained willingness to accommodate customers instead of insisting on high standards […] The underlying problem was that the BBA failed to manage the conflict between the need to act as a commercial organisation in order to attract and retain customers and the need to exercise a high degree of rigour and independence in its investigations in order to satisfy those who might consider relying on its certificates” [paras 2.42 and 2.43].
• The National House Building Council (NHBC) ‘was unwilling to upset its own customers and the wider construction industry by revealing the scale of the use of combustible insulation in the external walls of high-rise buildings, contrary to the statutory guidance. We have concluded that the conflict between the regulatory function of building control and the pressures of commercial interests prevents a system of that kind from effectively serving the public interest’ [para 2.50].

These extracts paint a damning picture, but do not mention corruption. So what happens if we do apply the lens of corruption analysis to what the report tells us about Grenfell? Even though the Inquiry did not examine corruption, the report does provide a substantial amount of information to allow such an analysis. 

As a start, we should clarify what is meant by ‘corruption’. Of course, not all things that go wrong are due to corruption, even though the term is readily applied on social media. That makes it even more important to choose a definition and apply it reasonably. The CSC defines corruption in a generic sense as ‘the abuse of entrusted power for private gain which harms the public interest’. This covers a multitude of activities seen in the Grenfell case, including conflicts of interest, regulatory capture and cronyism (for more precise definition of these terms, see the Dictionary of Corruption).

The best-known form of corruption is bribery, and this has particular relevance to the question of prosecutions in the Grenfell case because bribery can be prosecuted under the Bribery Act of 2010.  This defines bribery as when someone ‘promises or gives a financial or other advantage to another person, and intends the advantage (i) to induce a person to perform improperly a relevant function or activity, or (ii) to reward a person for the improper performance of such a function or activity’. 

Might this apply to the BRE, the BBA or NHBC, who were responsible for certification and accreditation, and their relationships with the ‘dishonest’ companies? The report describes as a ‘conflict of interest’ the process by which companies would funnel membership and other fees to one part of such outfits, while receiving undeserved accreditation from another. The report says ‘the practice of building control bodies and approved inspectors “working with” the industry rather than holding it to proper standards was corrupting, because it tended to undermine the independence of building control officers and approved inspectors‘ [Vol II para 26.68 – my emphasis]. 

The word ‘corrupting’ does a lot of heavy-lifting here, since there is no further exploration of which individuals were ‘corrupting’ which other individuals and whether this did, or was intended to, induce or reward an improper performance of function. 

If that were happening in Bangladesh or Turkey, campaigners would be saying that it looks very like a bribe and should be investigated as such. Given the Grenfell Inquiry did not look for bribery we cannot say in this case whether there is potential for a Bribery Act prosecution, but it should certainly be one avenue for the police to explore. 

On other aspects of corruption, the very under-used offence of Misconduct in Public Office might apply to any or all of those who held public office – officials (perhaps even Ministers) at the Department for Communities and Local Government and at the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea RBKC) and its Tenant Management Organisation (TMO). The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) says this requires ‘serious wilful abuse or neglect of the power or responsibilities of the public office held.’ The report is scathing about the government’s neglect of cladding fire safety risks over a number of years [paras 2.5-2.14] and accused the RKBC and TMO of ‘a persistent indifference to fire safety, particularly the safety of vulnerable people‘. Is this ‘serious wilful abuse or neglect of power’? The report does not tell us, but we can only hope that the language and analysis used in the report was designed to provide the foundation for a prosecution. 

A corruption analyst would also be look for other things: regulatory capture, cronyism, patronage, lobbying, the revolving door, to name but a few. But with the marginal exception of lobbying, the report is silent on these things too. That is without even delving into the more philosophical question of whether the role of private sector in providing public goods (which the report does cover in other contexts) increased corruption risk to an unacceptable level.

Where does this leave us? It was an Inquiry into ‘the circumstances leading up to and surrounding the fire at Grenfell Tower‘. The report, mainly by omission, suggests that corruption was not one such circumstance, or perhaps that it was insufficiently important to attach the label of corruption given the many other subjects covered in the 1700 pages. Bizarrely, therefore, the circumstances that have so many of the hallmarks of corruption do not bear that label. 

Perhaps it is no wonder that campaigners for the victims are dissatisfied. Without proper analysis of the problem, it is much harder to find an appropriate solution. Part of the solution is exemplary prosecutions, both to provide justice for the victims and as a deterrent to individuals and organisations from ever doing anything similar again. But based on the report’s emphasis, corruption-related prosecutions for the Grenfell tragedy look unlikely. 

The Grenfell Inquiry may be done and dusted, but it should leave anti-corruption campaigners with a sour taste. It could all so easily happen again. Where was the part of the UK’s anti-corruption apparatus that was insisting corruption should be in the Terms of Reference? Who will be assisting the police in applying the concepts of the Bribery Act to the report? Which part of the UK law enforcement ecosystem has the expertise, experience and resources to prosecute corruption-related cases? Where is the general anti-corruption law that allows a tragedy with so many hallmarks of corruption to result in prosecutions? 

In truth, the UK needs to reform its anti-corruption governance as a matter of urgency; we need a senior figure such as an independent anti-corruption commissioner to conduct the orchestra; and we need a general anti-corruption law to provide justice for victims when corruption is clearly at play but prosecutions are not seeming to follow. The resounding conclusion of the Grenfell Inquiry was that such a tragedy should never be allowed to happen again. In the absence of examining the role played by corruption, it is much harder to be certain that such a tragedy can be avoided in future.

Professor Robert Barrington looks at the intent behind flows of dark money into the UK – and concludes that the UK is ill-equipped to deal with the threat of strategic corruption. 

When lots of Russian money flows into London and the UK financial system, is there any malevolent intent behind it? Setting aside the unproven theories about Russian funding for the pro-Brexit campaign, there are plenty of examples that throw up red flags – such as the Lebedev peerage, the involvement of Russians as political party donors, oligarchs investing in strategic (though legitimate) businesses, and philanthropic donations to universities.  But these are red flags only because of the nationalities of those involved, not because of proven corruption.

The question of the intent behind such activities has arisen because the dealings of Russia in Ukraine – for some years before the invasion – have brought to the world’s attention an issue that has come to be known as ‘strategic corruption’. This is essentially the promotion of corruption in another country by a sponsoring government to further its national interest or foreign policy objectives. 

The concept of strategic corruption started to appear in the lexicon of corruption terms towards the end of the 2010s.  Alternative framings include ‘corruption as statecraft‘, used by Transparency International in a 2019 report; and the ‘weaponisation of corruption’. The term strategic corruption has gained wider exposure through being included in the US Government’s Countering-Corruption Strategy (2022), where it is defined as: “when a government weaponizes corrupt practices as a tenet of its foreign policy.” This echoes the description offered by a comprehensive article in Foreign Affairs (2020): “a country’s weaponization of corruption against other states in pursuit of national goals.” 

Russia’s involvement in various activities within Ukraine prior to 2022 – for example, in providing covert financial and other support for corrupt politicians known to support Russian influence over Ukraine – is often cited as an example of strategic corruption. However, many of its characteristics do not differ from those used by both sides in the Cold War to advance their national interests and foreign policy objectives.

There are several beneficiaries of strategic corruption, not all of whom may themselves be corrupt:  

• The sponsoring state which has enabled and promoted corruption in another country. The sponsoring state is a corruptor, but that does not in itself signify that the government of the sponsoring state is corrupt (although it may be).  
• Those within the ‘corrupted’ state who are the agents of the sponsoring state in carrying out the corruption. For example, a politician or public official who has been encouraged, supported, induced, or coerced by others to act corruptly. These agents may themselves be corrupt – if they are abusing entrusted power for private gain – or they may engage in other forms of wrongdoing, such as treason.
• The individuals who are corrupted, either directly by the sponsoring state, or indirectly by that state’s agents; they would usually be individuals who are abusing a position of entrusted power for private gain.  

Mechanisms for strategic corruption include:  

• Corrupt subversion of the political system through political financing or rewards to politicians
• Co-opting influential individuals through provision of jobs or other benefits
• Covertly supporting the promotion within key institutions of individuals who are known to be corrupt. 

Scholars and practitioners debate the question of intent. For example, when large quantities of cash are laundered into the economy of another country, it may be unclear whether that activity is in part or in whole intended to corrupt the destination country and its institutions. In such a case, if the money laundering is intended to corrupt the wider context, the activity would fall within the definition of strategic corruption; if corruption within the destination country is a by-product of the money laundering, it is contested as to whether this should be regarded as strategic corruption.  

Where does that leave the UK?  Of course, we do not have sufficient information on intent to be able to make a judgement about the large flows of money from Russia. But it is possible – indeed likely – that several things have been going on at once: 

• Money being parked in the UK as a safe haven 
• Money being infiltrated into the UK in order to gain influence or subvert key institutions 
• Money originally brought to the UK as a safe haven being re-purposed to curry favour with the Putin regime 
• Money originally brought to the UK as a safe haven being used in ways that promote or engender corruption as a by-product.

In a sense, it may not matter what the intent of Russia has been. The importance of the Russian case is that it highlights what could – very easily – be done by a hostile government through legitimate means. China, Iran, and other governments known to have used strategic corruption elsewhere would not have to do much work to find out how to deploy strategic corruption in the UK. It is exactly this kind of threat that has been worrying the authorities in the US – hence the FBI’s creation of a Foreign Influence Taskforce, among other initiatives.

What is the UK equivalent of such US initiatives? None, as far as we know. Might it fall within the remit of the Prime Minister’s Anti-Corruption Champion? Possibly, but that role has been empty now for fourteen months and counting. The truth is that this is one of the many areas related to corruption that is so low on the priority list of the UK government that there has been no coordinated or coherent response.

Further reading

Huss, O. and Pozsgai-Alvarez, J. 2022. “Strategic Corruption as a Threat to Security and the New Agenda for Anti-Corruption”. The Corruption in Fragile States Blog.  https://www.corruptionjusticeandlegitimacy.org/post/strategic-corruption-as-a-threat-to-security-and-the-new-agenda-for-anti-corruption.

Zelikow, P., Edeleman, E., Harrison, K. and Gventer, C.W. 2020. “The rise of strategic corruption”. Foreign Affairs 99: 107.

Frank Vogl (Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University, co-founder of Transparency International, Chairman of the Partnership for Transparency Fund) highlights the importance of a new report from The Sentry, a human rights NGO, on the role played by the Wagner Group in state capture. You can read his further reflections on state capture in this review of the seminal article on the subject by Prof Liz David-Barrett.

Many of us engaged in issues related to corruption have long been concerned about state capture. I would encourage everyone who is interested in the subject to read the new report by The Sentry, Architects of Terror: The Wagner Group’s Blueprint for State Capture in the Central African Republic.

We have seen elsewhere how military forces have captured key institutions of government and secured major business interests at the same time – from Myanmar to Egypt, from Pakistan to Iran. We have seen how highly corrupt influential groups of businessmen have bribed top government officials on a scale that has enabled them to massively steal from the state – for example, Zuma and his associates in South Africa. In so many countries, we have also seen how men like Orban in Hungary and Erdoğan in Turkey, and many more, have methodically replaced government workers with sycophants, illicitly secured national media control, undermined institutional checks and balances in government and so, in effect, captured the machinery of the state. 

Few anti-corruption specialists have, however, adequately looked at the monstrous form of state capture pursued by Russia’s Wagner Group in a number of countries in Africa. Under the explicit authority of the Kremlin, Russian commanders have forged blunt deals with several national leaders under which they will secure these leaders in power in return for rights to vast natural resources. The methods that the Wagner Group deploys include massacres, routine rape, destruction of homes, and the terrorising of national military troops so that they perpetrate extensive horrendous crimes under the direction of Wagner’s commanders. 

The Sentry’s important report contains a number of recommendations, including the designation of Wagner Group as a terrorist organisation by concerned governments, and the creation of “a coalition similar to the Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh/ISIS – critically including African states – to counter the Wagner Group’s malign influence on the African continent and elsewhere”.

We should all consider the humanitarian, governance and security implications of what the Wagner Group is now doing in Africa. It is not too late to counter the atrocities that are unfolding and the state capture that the Kremlin is orchestrating. 

Philip Trewhitt, formerly an investigator on fraud and corruption at the United Nations, gives an insight into the nature of such work and what lessons can be drawn for dealing with future scandals.

One day in the summer of 2004, I was running into a bunker in Baghdad to avoid some mortar fire. A normal day at the office at that time. When my phone started ringing I, for obvious reasons, chose to ignore it. It rang again a few minutes later. It was Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve now in charge of the investigations into breaches of UN sanctions imposed against the regime of Saddam Hussein – what became known as the UN oil-for-food scandal. He asked me to head up the Baghdad end of it. And so, I became a corruption investigator. For the next 18 months I worked with the best-qualified and most-motivated team I have ever been part of, drawn from across the globe. We achieved almost nothing. A couple of minor jail sentences; a few fines. But the numerous politicians and so-called human rights champions proved to have benefitted from kickbacks? The many well-known international companies who knowingly paid them, directly or indirectly? Pretty much zilch.

Fresh from that mighty success, I was asked to join a UN corruption task force in New York, with over 300 cases of fraud and corruption sitting on the books. A number of the cases I worked on showed clear criminality and were proved well beyond the required level for referral to law enforcement, yet few such referrals were made. Later, I worked on investigations for a succession of UN and other international agencies, either as staff or as a consultant. Once again, we proved the cases. Once again, very little resulted from this.

I should point out that is not fair to compare lack of action in the oil-for-food investigations with the failure to follow up internal investigations carried out by the UN and other international agencies themselves. The power to take action on the oil-for-food sanctions breaches was primarily in the hands of national authorities, who for the most part, and for a variety of reasons, had no interest in progressing cases. The international agencies do, however, have the power to take action on cases involving their own staff and contractors. I do not suggest that this never happened while I was involved. There were successes, just not very big ones, relatively speaking. If action was taken, it was generally too little, too late, or simply the wrong action. In combatting corruption, the grand proclamations and the mountain of policies were matched by a lack of ambition and action which was truly stunning, especially when investigators were providing solid grounds for taking action.

Operating in the most difficult and dangerous parts of the world, where corruption is often endemic and local authorities may be part of the problem, is not easy. Those working for the internal investigations bodies – mostly good, bright, motivated people – may reasonably point to the increased number of allegations coming in to the internal investigations as proof of their success in persuading people to come forward with concerns; they will point to substantially increased staffing of those internal agencies as evidence of the concerns being taken seriously; and they will produce annual reports filled with pie charts on different types of investigations ‘substantiated’ or ‘unsubstantiated’. They may also emphasise the type of allegations they have investigated and mention companies being ‘sanctioned’ or ‘debarred’, in other words prevented from doing business with the agency. What they will probably not be able to show, because it so rarely happens, is evidence of bad people going to jail.

Why not? There is no simple answer. It is not that those at the top of these agencies are mad, bad, irresponsible, lazy, self-interested or have built a career on studiously avoiding controversy. The key factor is that there are systemic faultlines in the way investigation bodies are structured and allegations are dealt with. The overriding goal for management is not to hold the guilty to account but the avoidance of reputational harm. There is a tendency to revert to the least confrontational response possible, particularly if the case involves government officials. It is widely acknowledged among the UN staff that stopping funds flowing to 10 or so countries in the world unless they sort themselves out would reduce corruption hugely, but the political costs are too high. There are other problems as well. Investigation mandates are too wide, conflating sexual harassment with systematic looting of projects, which makes it difficult for investigators to build up specialist expertise. Investigators face, in reality, a requirement to go well beyond the required level of proof, with those accused being accorded full rights and protections, but without investigators having comparable powers. The internal legal staff do not always help – for every one that offers a way forward there is another who whispers about threats to UN sovereign immunity if investigators are allowed to testify, or worries about being sued for libel.

Senior managers in international agencies are able to point to their robust anti-corruption policies. There are a certainly a lot of them out there. Everyone has a whistleblower protection policy. That did not stop a senior management official saying to me: ‘we shouldn’t be protecting scum’. Everyone has a ‘zero tolerance’ policy in relation to fraud and corruption. That did not stop another senior management official saying to me – in public – that he would expect me to be arrested if I tried to conduct an investigation in one of the countries for which he was responsible and that he would ensure the agency ‘would not lift a finger’ to have me released. (He added that it was ‘nothing personal’).

I left the UN around a decade ago, but have no reason to believe that things have changed in recent years. My advice to the donors who fund such international agencies is this: if you want to know whether an agency is taking corruption seriously, do not ask about policies or  ‘governance issues’ or ‘financial mismanagement’. Ask who is going to jail.

Laurence Cockcroft reviews Invisible Trillions: How Financial Secrecy Is Imperiling Capitalism and Democracy and the Way to Renew Our Broken System by Raymond Baker, writing that Baker offers a comprehensive overview of the danger that global financial secrecy poses to the capitalist-democratic system, even if he doesn’t provide perfect solutions: “an important book for anyone interested in the the cause and effect of the lack of transparency, the continuing role of secrecy in the modern world, and, above all, the consequent challenge to democracy itself.”

The various forms of secrecy which have come to characterise global capitalism have created threats to democracy in both high and low income countries. This secrecy hides numerous forms of corrupt behaviour by companies, banks and political parties, sustains inequality between and within nations  and is a major threat to existing and potential democratic systems. Raymond Baker’s Invisible Trillions maps out this theme, showing that western political systems are failing to address it, and proposes a set of measures which are feasible at both the national and international level without undermining the basic principles of capitalism. 

Baker has honed his argument over several decades. As a business practitioner in Nigeria in the early 1960s he quickly became knowledgable about the false invoicing which characterised the country’s international trade. He came to see that this would prove a fatal flaw in Nigeria’s economic development, transferring profits overseas and depriving the country’s exchequer of the revenue it would need, with ominous portent for the future of the oil industry. He spent several decades researching this phenomenon globally and in 2005 published Capitalism’s Achilles Heel : Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free Market System. In 2006, Baker was able to set up Global Financial Integrity (GFI) in Washington DC to carry out both further analysis and (more importantly for Baker) to campaign on this and related issues of transparency and corporate integrity. As such, he has been a key member of the informal coalition of NGOs active on this issue in the US and Europe. There are very few in this coalition who have his level of detailed knowledge of the mechanisms by which corruption, broadly defined, can flourish in a world of corporate secrecy.  

Baker fears that the phenomena which he described in Achilles Heel has exploded and is now a many-headed hydra. The starting point of Invisible Trillions is the gargantuan sum of illicit funds that flow through what he labels “capitalism’s financial secrecy system” from both the medium- and low-income countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia, as well as from Russia and China as the successful rich seek to deposit their funds in alleged safe havens – often via the world of the secrecy jurisdictions so actively supported by western governments, notably those of the US and the UK.

The mechanisms for this have been exposed in a series of leaks by the Investigative Consortium of Independent Journalists (ICIJ), amongst which the Pandora Papers showed that fifteen US states house more than two hundred trusts which in turn provide an anonymous home whose secrecy rivals that of more notorious places in the Caribbean. The vast gap between the flow and control of funds seeking a safe haven in the US is demonstrated by the fact that 99.9% of laundered funds are ultimately successful in finding a formal and authorised account in a US financial institution or legitimate property. It is this transition from illegal status to legal status which also lies at the heart of the phenomenon of illegally-sourced goods, such as oil ‘bunkered’ off Nigeria or timber illegally felled in Amazonia or DRC, which become legal as they reach the higher levels of the supply chain. 

While the phenomena described by Baker have long been recognized, his central argument is that illicit financial flows, tax evasion, tax avoidance, and schemes by corporations to hide revenues and profits all combine, “driving inequality, impoverishing billions, empowering criminals, enriching despots.” And, for good measure, he adds that the secret financial system leads to misallocations of finance to the point where the “trillions” are not invested productively, thus undermining potential economic growth. 

Baker offers a useful analysis of why there has been so little progress in fighting the financial secrecy system. Key issues are the lack of uniformity in collaboration between the various regulatory authorities fighting money laundering in Europe and the US; weaknesses in the new legislation addressing beneficial ownership; the ‘golden visa’ schemes which enable the corruptly rich to easily acquire citizenship in a range of tax havens; political party funding rules which are if anything increasingly loose – as was the defining case of Citizens United in the US  – allowing foreign donors to fund their target candidates; and the repeal of the US Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, which since 1933 had separated investment banking from commercial banking.  

Baker’s focus is more positive at the international level, highlighting the OECD, the World Trade Organisation and parts of the United Nations as being well ahead of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in trying to establish improved practice both within and between states.  

The alarm bell ringing loud and clear in this book is that the financial secrecy system has become so large and promotes such great inequalities of income and wealth that capitalism in this form now poses a core challenge to the survival of democracy. As he bluntly states: “The democratic-capitalist system is at risk.” 

Building on his analysis, Baker offers a roll call of activities for future action. The common theme is the imperative for an end to secrecy and an opening to transparency, with a direct impact on the quality of democracy. High on this list are corporate transparency (ending the practice by which companies can disguise even the existence of a subsidiary in a foreign jurisdiction), a convergence of trade and audit reports which would make trade mispricing (by invoice manipulation) impossible, an end to the defining characteristics of tax havens (perhaps now heralded by the new fifteen per cent minimum global corporation tax). Corporate governance with much stronger employee stakeholder role is also on the agenda. In the world of international finance, he calls for an end to financial products representing no real world assets (notably a range of derivatives) and a much more rigorous policing of auditors too long complicit in the behaviour of both multinationals and banks. Further, the book reverts to the broad theme of transparency trade and shows how the World Bank couid easily produce an annual report of progress in this area.  

Today, while there are greater efforts by governments on both sides of the Atlantic to develop approaches to reveal the true beneficial owners of the shell companies, no government has yet advocated closing down these entities. But then, as Baker argues on p.140, the complex structures that support the financial secrecy system are supported by Western governments and advocated for by powerful individuals and corporations who most benefit from the system. His overall synthesis is that: “A more equitable world cannot be realised while widespread secrecy pervades operations in one of the components of the democratic-capitalist equation, while the other component strives to operate with transparency.” 

The book’s strength, in addition to its warning of the risks to democracy and to capitalism, is its very comprehensive overview of the failure of reform to date of the trade, finance and banking sectors. Its roll call of actions is strong on conviction but the practical steps which are a condition for successful reform don’t always tie in with the analysis of why so little has been achieved in a meaningful way in the last twenty years. This is, however, an important book for anyone interested in the the cause and effect of the lack of transparency, the continuing role of secrecy in the modern world, and, above all, the consequent challenge to democracy itself.  

Frank Vogl, author of The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption – Endangering Our Democracy, kindly commented on this draft. 

Laurence Cockroft is the author of Global Capitalism : Money Power and Ethics in the Modern World and (with Anne-Christine Wegener) Unmasked : Corruption in the West.  

Raymond Baker’s Invisible Trillions is published by Berrett-Koehler (USA) and available via Amazon (Hardcover, Audio and Kindle). 

Professor Robert Barrington looks at the crisis of values engulfing the UK’s foremost business lobbying group, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), and offers some personal reflections on encountering the CBI’s lobbying techniques.

The CBI “meet with senior politicians and officials every day” to lobby on behalf of members.  Yet we have learned from its own Chair that it has hired “culturally toxic people” who were “promoted too quickly […] to protect our cultural values” and more generally “paid more attention to competence than behaviour”. Moreover “commentators concluded that the organisation was cold-hearted and toxic”.

Not all of the CBI staff, by any means, are ‘toxic’. We do not know the scale, although in addition to other staff, the Director General himself was ‘removed’ following unspecified allegations. The discussion on the CBI’s culture and values has rightly focussed on the immediate allegations of sexual harassment and rape, but that casts a wider shadow on the CBI’s culture and values. What does it stand for as an organisation? In other words, what values underpin its vast lobbying apparatus?

This challenge to the CBI’s values will come as no surprise to anti-corruption campaigners.  After all, it was the CBI that lobbied against the UK Bribery Act in 2010/11, with the Director General at the time declaring it was “not fit for purpose”. The CBI’s argument was that, despite bribery already being illegal, the new Bribery Act would disadvantage British companies – in other words, they could happily live with the ineffective and unenforced old anti-bribery laws, but should not be expected to live with a modern law that might prevent companies paying bribes, or continuing to bribe, to win business. Of course, it was not quite phrased like that but, despite being dressed up as a technical objection, the sub-text was clear from other conversations, statements and media articles.

This argument was a) implying that the CBI’s members would be justified in not adhering to the law, not just in the UK but in multiple other countries; b) in direct contradiction to the UK’s international obligations as a signatory to the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention; c) out of line with most FTSE-100 companies’ ESG statements at the time (or CSR/sustainability statement as they were generally known in those days); d) last, but not least, what might be politely termed as free of values.

On what basis was the CBI making this case in its frequent, secret, meetings with government? We do not know. Were its member companies telling it to say this – and if so which ones? Was there a debate in the CBI with companies that might disagree? What was the evidence that it would disadvantage British business, and how was this weighed against the harm that bribery does to the societies in which the bribes are paid?

At the time, as the person at Transparency International in charge of running the campaign to try and secure the Bribery Act, I could find none of this information. The CBI  did not publish its evidence base, nor basic details like who was sitting on its internal Bribery Act group or which Minister and officials it had spoken to. I could find nothing on the CBI website. In the several meetings I held with the CBI and its working group on the Bribery Act, there was plenty of assertion but no evidence, generally put forward by the lawyers of a small group of FTSE100 companies (including BAE Systems – the very company whose own huge bribery scandal had forced the government into passing the Bribery Act in the first place). On this issue at least, the CBI was a values-free zone. Actually, it had one value: to use its frequent secret lobbying meetings with government to put forward a viewpoint that it felt was representing its members. It represented business not society, and certainly not anything like integrity or good governance.

The Open Access database tells us that in the five years between 2018 and 2022, the CBI met government Ministers 265 times. That is a lot of lobbying – and those meetings were just the ones with Ministers. By contrast, I recall meeting Ministers to discuss the Bribery Act perhaps two or three times under the Labour government, and not at all under the Coalition government. Indeed, Ken Clarke, who was the Minister responsible for implementing the Bribery Act and notionally the government’s Anti-Corruption Champion, steadfastly ignored or refused requests to meet Transparency International, while at the same time meeting industry groups and delaying the Act at their behest.

The argument in favour of lobbying being permitted in a democracy is that it is an important part of the democratic process. All viewpoints should be represented to Ministers and officials. Those Ministers and officials are better informed, and evidence-led policy-making can result. But if one group has privileged and secret access, and is far better resourced, then it is not hard to guess whose opinion is likely to prevail.

The good news is that the CBI lost the argument over the Bribery Act. The law was passed, and not repealed, and I have not heard of a single British company that went out of business as a result. Of course, if a company can only survive by breaking national laws and international conventions, a values-based assessment might be that society is better off without such companies.

So what wider lessons might be drawn from this?  First, that there is a huge inequality of arms when business is lobbying. Second, this is compounded by a lack of transparency that tips too far into secrecy. Third, that member companies are far to slow to act when a trade body acting in their name has a significant dissonance with the values they claim lie at the heart of their own businesses.

Whether the CBI is reformed and survives, or whether it is replaced by other bodies, the spotlight should be on the members to make sure that their representative bodies live up to some semblance of ESG values. That does not just mean no more sexual harassment: it means responsible lobbying and finding means to reconcile the needs of society (who also happen to be employees and customers) with the needs of business. This is a timely re-think for the CBI and its members.

Frank Vogl, Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University, co-founder of Transparency International, Chairman of the Partnership for Transparency Fund and author of “The Enablers – How The West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption – Endangering our Democracy,” reviews a recent article by CSC Director Professor Liz David-Barrett.  

Sussex University’s Professor Elizabeth Dávid‐Barrett’s new article – State capture and development: a conceptual framework– is published at a time when the leaders of democratic governments are grappling with the mounting challenges of autocracy and nationalist populism. Too often, these topics yield overly broad and general discussions without adequately delving into critical aspects of the core natures of the non-democratic regimes that abound today. This new article takes us towards a better understanding of the behaviors of governments that abuse their public offices as they serve themselves at the expense of their citizens.  

To start with, the Professor’s definition is one that should become widely accepted and used. She writes:  

“State capture is similar to regulatory capture but broader in scope. What is captured is not just regulation but core state functions, including the ability to shape the rules of the game through constitutional and legislative reform, but also the power of patronage which facilitates appointments to key power-holding or scrutiny bodies, and the power to distribute state assets and public money, and powers to regulate the space in which other oversight bodies such as the media and civil society act. State capture occurs when those who are entrusted with these powers abuse them consistently to shape the rules, appointments, allocation of state funds and rights in ways that make them less public-interest serving and more tailored to benefit narrow interest groups.”  

The importance of the article is underscored when it is recognized that approximately one-half of the world’s population live under regimes that pursue state capture. These are what the Economist Intelligence Unit describes as “hybrid regimes” and “authoritarian regimes” (see table below).

Looking at the operations of governments through the lens of state capture, as Professor Dávid‐Barrett encourages us to do, quite directly highlights who the victims of corruption are and how governments use diverse means to impoverish so many citizens as they seek both to increase their own wealth and secure their power. Too little research has focused explicitly on the impact of state capture on development and the section in this new article should serve to stimulate further substantive work with benefits for all development practitioners.  

Such an exploration might take into consideration a wide range of issues not detailed in the new article, but that no doubt are prominent on the Professor’s agenda for further research and more publications. For example, I have long been fascinated by the question of why some regimes have managed to secure themselves in power and promoted state capture over decades, while others have only managed relatively short periods of successful state capture. Consider, for example, that Teodoro Obiang has been President of Equatorial Guinea in West Africa since 1982, or that Yoweri Museveni has been President of Uganda in East Africa since 1986, while Alexander Lukashenko has served as Belarus’s President since 1994. These long-term captors of their states contrast, for example, with others who for only a handful of years used their powers to plunder their nations such as the now jailed former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and South Africa’s former President Jacob Zuma who faces criminal charges today.  

The degree of state capture and its duration under a single group of leaders depends in part on the extent to which those in power have captured all of the state’s institutions of justice and manipulated the judiciary to, in effect, permit the national political leadership to enjoy full impunity.  I suspect this is not the whole answer. In many countries, from Tunisia in 2012, to anti-Zuma protests from 2017 in South Africa, public protests have at times been so overwhelming that they have been the prime engine for ousting oppressive national leaders. With the rise of social media as a tool for organizing protests and the increased skills of civil society activists, the number of powerful protests by citizens has been formidable, as evident from the findings of the Global Protest Tracker developed by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This is an increasingly important aspect of state capture and Professor Dávid‐Barrett, who discusses civil society in her article, may wish to expand on this in the future. 

Another feature of state capture worthy of deeper research and debate concerns the roles that the military plays in some countries. The military has been the power behind the governments of Pakistan for many years, stepping in to take control at times when it has considered appropriate to secure stability and its own real power. Egypt has long been under the iron fist of military rule, as have numerous other countries – and in every case the military has acquired businesses, developed its own enterprises to secure public procurement contracts, and taken control of state-owned enterprises. 

Professor Dávid‐Barrett draws attention to the close ties between business and political elites in conspiring to secure state capture. In many countries, it is useful to consider how the business elites attained their powerful positions in the first place. Professor Louise Shelley in her books, “Dirty Entanglements: Crime, Corruption, and Terrorism” (2014) and “Dark Commerce: How a New Illicit Economy Is Threatening Our Future”(2018), provides evidence of the close ties in many countries between business elites and organized crime. The late Professor Karen Dawisha in her book “Putin’s Kleptocracy – Who Owns Russia?” (2014) and journalist Catherine Belton in her book “Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West People” (2020), both detail the formidable roles that organized crime played in Russia in the 1990s in aiding and abetting businessmen and politicians to attain state capture.  

Indeed, this new article by Professor Dávid‐Barrett is likely to trigger much further research on state capture and prove to be a scholarly landmark that provides inroads to understanding not only the nature of hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes, but the challenges that the victims of corruption confront in so many countries today.