Cricket, corruption and the challenge of reform

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When corruption is mentioned, it is easy to instantly assume lots of things.  Of one those assumptions is likely to be that whatever is happening, it is happening far from the UK’s shores.  What one doesn’t tend to think of are green cricket fields in central Chelmsford, home of Essex County Cricket Club.  Yet it was here that many of the good cricket-loving citizens of middle England were first directly introduced to the sport’s problem with corruption.  Indeed, Essex’s Danish Kaneria and Mervyn Westfield, the key protagonists in that story, have both been banned from cricket for their involvement in spot-fixing during a 2009 one-day tournament.

When the allegations first surfaced cricket, and cricket fans, were still largely in denial.  Research has since shown that the sport is clearly vulnerable to corruption and furthermore that it is struggling to deal with the challenge of counteracting it, with Transparency International reporting that urgent action is required to deal with the changing nature of the challenge.

The International Cricket Council (ICC) has been trying – generally with limited success – to tackle corruption. In 2000 it formed the Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU) to try and counter the increasing allegations of corruption in the sport, giving the Unit the power to investigate individuals suspected of being involved spot-fixing. The ACU also has a role in education – all players involved in international cricket go through its educational programmes to learn about the risks of corruption, including the tactics used by corruptors and the punishments that can come from accepting money and engaging in fixing. Although these provide a good start, they have not managed to prevent corruption from happening, with problems outside the ACU’s control, some of which are discussed below, still being prevalent in many areas of modern-day cricket.

The challenge of getting players to talk

Corruption, as is widely acknowledged, is notoriously difficult to detect.  One small moment in a match, such as when Pakistani bowler Mohammad Amir bowled a number of no-balls against England, can bring huge amounts of money for those betting on the game without having much of an effect on the overall outcome.

The ICC had been trying to get to grips with the corruption challenge a long time before messrs Westfield, Kaneria and Amir came to prominence.  Lord (Paul) Condon, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London and former head of the ACU, released a hard-hitting report highlighting a ‘climate of silence, apathy, ignorance and fear’ in the game.  Players feared coming forward to talk to the authorities about corruption, particularly when their teammates were involved, as doing so risked them being branded as informants or being ostracised by their fellow players.

There is plenty of evidence supporting this – to take but one example, Aaqib Javed, a Pakistani international, lost many friends when he spoke to the Qayyum Commission, which investigated corruption within Pakistani cricket.  Aaquib talked about the challenge of fighting off bribe-givers and how even high-profile players such as Waqar Younis and Wasim Akram has allegedly been approached.  Suffice to say, Javed’s time in the national team did not last much longer after this, his international career ending abruptly at a relatively early age.

Given Javed’s problems after testifying, it is unsurprising that other players have not wanted to come forward to talk about corruption. Recently, Hong Kong’s Irfan Ahmed was banned for five years for not declaring that he had been approached about taking a bribe. He did not accept it, but he was banned as he didn’t willingly come forward.  The attempted bribe allegedly came from Nasem Gulzar, a close friend and former mentor of Ahmed. It is tough not to feel sorry for Ahmed as in reality he was not involved in fixing any game and was no doubt caught in a difficult predicament.  Perhaps the banning of players in situations like this is nonetheless a step in the right direction for the ICC as it could bring others out to avoid receiving a similar fate. Regardless of that, it is a prima facie example of how tricky these cases can be to deal with.

The emergence of T20

The growth of cricket as a sport has resulted in a large increase in the number of opportunities for corruption to develop. Twenty20 cricket appears to be particularly susceptible as, since its introduction to the professional arena in 2003, it has attracted both big crowds but also big money.  Domestic tournaments such as the Indian Premier League (IPL) and Australian Big Bash League certainly provide some excellent entertainment, they also open up ample chances to corrupt players.

How has this been happening?  In essence it is all about picking the right target. The sums of money involved in the IPL create a clear disparity between players, with, for example, Australian international Shane Watson earning around a million pounds for his involvement in the 2016 tournament. This huge pay-packet makes it unlikely anyone would target him – he has too much to lose.  But there are plenty of players who will be earning closer to 10,000 pounds in the tournament, and their financial situations certainly put them in a different, and perhaps more vulnerable, position.

The 2013 IPL saw the rise of a massive spot-fixing scandal involving a large number of Rajasthan Royals players and even one umpire, Asad Rauf. Of the players, Sreesanth, Ankeet Chavan and Ajit Chandila were all banned from cricket for life by the Board of Control for Cricket in India after their involvement in spot-fixing became clear, while Rauf was banned from umpiring for five years. The IPL is not alone in facing problems with corruption, but it does highlight that despite the best attempts of the ACU fixing is unfortunately still prevalent in the game.

Ways forward

The problem that the ACU faces is that proving that fixing has happened is a real challenge. Justice Qayyum’s report into corruption in cricket noted that most evidence is ‘primarily opinion and based upon personal suspicion’ rather than any truly incriminating proof. Essentially, it is difficult to make the difference between someone deliberately playing badly and someone just underperforming.  A cricketer could very easily be struggling with the conditions or simply having an off day – and there’s nothing corrupt about that.

Justice Qayyum made a similar point about lower-paid players. If Pakistan’s players at the time of his report were better paid, they would have been less likely to seek remuneration in other forms. Paying players more is much easier said than done, but while there are players like Irfan Ahmed who will only be earning less than £1,000 a month, there will always be easy targets. With the Twenty20 World Cup starting shortly, there will be plenty of targets as the associate nations start to play live on television for millions around the world to watch and bet on.

The de Speville Review

An independent review into the ICC’s anti-corruption capabilities resulted in a list of 27 recommendations being made by Bertrand de Speville, an anti-corruption consultant who was formerly head of the Independent Commission Against Corruption in Hong Kong.  13 of the recommendations in the report were accepted by the ICC. Some were actually already in place.  However, a number were rejected as the ICC had reservations about them. Some of these rejections make sense as de Speville doesn’t appear to place adequate importance on the confidentiality of players.  He suggests, for example, that all allegations be made public regardless of their accuracy and also advocates investigating players’ bank accounts to try and delve into ‘unexplained wealth’.

Of those recommendations that the ICC did accept, banning the acceptance of ‘gifts’ without the ICC’s permission certainly seems logical.  Furthermore, applying this rule to everyone involved in professional cricket clubs, from players to board members, is also an important step forward. Gifts may not necessarily lead to corruption but they could become a gateway into something far more serious.

As well as this, increasing the transparency of the ACU is important in allowing the public to see exactly what is happening, whilst also including a separate clause that this transparency should not come at the expense of necessary confidentiality. De Speville also suggests the appointment of a communicator who has experience as a cricket player to be able to teach current players about corruption. Finally, setting up a frequent survey of players could help start discussions about corruption, encouraging them to come forward and talk about bribery, potentially removing the apathy and ignorance that Lord Condon wrote of.

Unfortunately there is no mention of the problem cricket has with money, and how some players can be tempted far too easily in to inappropriate relationships. This does not necessarily mean that players need to be paid more, but it does show that increasing the penalties for being involved in corruption and then implementing those changes on an international scale would completely change the concepts of risk and reward in players’ minds.

The ACU may never truly win the fight against corruption given that many of the problems are outside its control.  However, the changes made after de Speville’s recommendations are certainly a step in the right direction.  And that has to be a good thing.

Richie Vaughan

University of Sussex

Posted in Sport

Strawberries, cream and … courtsiders; tennis and the challenge of tackling corruption

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Tennis, in the UK at least, is a sport of strawberries, cream and luscious green lawns. It couldn’t be more middle-England. Elsewhere in the world they may not, Melbourne perhaps to one side, have the lawns, but tennis is still seen as a sport of grace, style and elegance. It’s not supposed to be about corruption, thrown points and betting syndicates.

Following a report by Buzzfeed and the BBC allegations of match fixing have none the less cast a dispiriting shadow over the game. Indeed, the allegations look set to tarnish a sport which prides itself on good, clean, family fun. According to the BBC the head of the Tennis Integrity Unit has revealed that there were 246 alerts of suspicious betting on matches in 2015. Furthermore, 16 players were repeatedly flagged as potentially being involved.

These are dangerous signals. Any sport that wants to uphold its reputation as being clean needs to show that it has processes in place to deal with allegations like these and, if needed, to punish any miscreants found guilty. The Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU), formed in 2008, should be the tool through which tennis can sort this out. However, the tennis authorities have already tacitly admitted that they are not currently able to do this by announcing that there will be an independent anti-corruption review of the TIU,  The review will focus on transparency, independence and if the integrity education programme should be extended. But has not said how long the review will last.

What might tennis learn from the literature on anti-corruption organisations? The authorities could do worse than take a look at the work of Gabriel Kuris, an American academic. He highlights the potential problems of immediately enforcing stricter laws following scandals. Calls for integrity units ‘with more teeth’ are often made in the wake of a corruption scandal. More teeth means, for many, strong(er) law enforcement powers, but, as Kuris demonstrates, just granting these units these powers does not necessarily make them more effective. On the contrary, simply enacting stricter laws can in fact be counterproductive.

Kuris describes anti-corruption units as either guard dogs or watchdogs. The guard dogs are the units with strong investigative powers who seek, pursue and engage the threats. They have, in other words, real ‘teeth’ with which to go after alleged miscreants. Watchdog ACAs, on the other hand, rely on collecting witness testimony and issuing public reports. Watchdogs may not possess teeth that are as big and sharp, but they can on occasion be better able to combat corruption. Watchdog ACAs are, in other words, much more about the bark and much less about the bite – and for tennis that might be no bad thing.

Anti-corruption agencies that rely on well-developed sets of potential punishments that they themselves have a responsibility to administer require (lots of) resources and real in depth knowledge to make charges stick. These anti-corruption systems can be hard to maintain and require a level of expertise in the alleged misdemeanours that tennis does not readily have available. Until tennis as a sport is able to allocate enough resources to the TIU then pinning hopes on a guard dog institution is simply unrealistic.

Within the TIU there is a lack of resources and arguably a lack of political will and some within the Buzzfeed and BBC investigation even suggest it may have covered up previous issues of match fixing. The Tennis Integrity Unit may subsequently be better off following a watchdog model of anti-corruption.

Watchdog ACAs are able to act more like investigative journalists. Those involved are not forced to focus on producing evidence that would stand up in a court of law, rather they can concentrate on highlighting potential wrong-doing and bring it to the relevant authorities’ attention. This would also enable tennis to think more broadly about how to deal with the endemic of betting that now exists. A full-time betting analyst working with the TIU would certainly make a contribution to understanding rather more about how betting relationships work and pinpointing potential problems before they arise. The TIU has, according to the organisation’s head, Nigel Willerton recognised the need for this and within the review they will be looking into the potential for employing a betting analyst.  Tennis would also be able to quickly raise awareness of specific problems without having to wait for prosecutions to be handled.

The focus may still understandably be on prosecutions, but looking to the future is also key to the success of anti-corruption initiatives. The initial focus for cleaning up tennis, as with any body in sport, should be on developing internal procedures and ensuring an open and independent leadership. This would encourage the greater oversight that is so desperately needed. The TIU should encourage those both inside and outside (such as sponsors) the sport to inspire younger players to avoid corruption whilst at the same time highlighting where the potential pitfalls lie and how to avoid getting caught up in them. There is currently and Integrity Education Program in place but this will need to be extended to encompass more players. The importance for tennis is to bring back trust in the sport and trust in the players themselves.

Tennis would benefit from adopting a watchdog ACA approach as it enables the authorities to be proactive. Kuris suggests that ACAs that follow this model are better able to devote their resources to prevention as they do not have to use the(ir inevitably limited) resources for detailed investigations. Tennis would be able to highlight the corruption risks that the sport faces and create mechanisms to prevent them from flourishing further without being bogged down in trying to bring charges against previous suspects.

Tennis prides itself in ‘family fun’, and having investigations without risk of litigation may encourage more of an open and honest conversation about these issues. However, tennis would require support from other bodies if it adopted a watchdog system of anti-corruption. But corruption in sport remains high on the agenda of many governments and NGOs and if tennis shows it is willing to take the initiative in rooting it out then there is every reason to believe that it will receive considerable support.

Hope is certainly not lost for tennis. But those within the sport need to act on the allegations made and they need to be seen to be taking a pro-active stance in addressing the problem. Then, and only then, will tennis be able to regain some of the trust that has been lost and become the ‘clean, nice, family sport’ which it prides itself on being.

Tilly Prior

University of Sussex

Posted in Sport

Tennis, court-siders and the challenge of dealing with sports betting

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Anyone who’s spent any time watching sport on British TV will be more than familiar with the dulcet tones of Ray Winstone.  Sport is, so the actor famous for his hardman persona will tell you, “all about the in-play” as he plugs the odds for the self-proclaimed world’s largest online gambling company.  According to one of their competitors “sport means more when you bet on it” whilst a third betting company ratchets up the excitement by claiming that “right now, anything could happen”.  If you believe the adverts, the sporting world is a fast-moving, emotionally-charged adrenalin rush where banter and pay outs dominate.

Glamorous though it may look (to some), there is plenty going on beneath the surface that the watching punter won’t be aware of.  Indeed, even investigative journalists who spend their lives looking in to how sport works know that things go on that even they can’t really get a handle on.   It is, for example, one thing having a five pound flutter on five correct results to keep yourself amused on a Saturday afternoon, it is quite another to be in regular contact with participants to try and get ahead of the game.  And, as we know, that happens far more frequently than sport purists have traditionally been prepared to admit.

Where once football and cricket led the way, tennis now seems to be the focus of attention.  Indeed, recent reports give the impression that tennis is a sport beset by betting problems.  As Sean Ingle revealed in the Guardian on Tuesday 9th February, there is an ever-growing body of evidence that shows tennis umpires, for example, in an increasingly worrying light.  In the lowest ranking tennis tournaments, umpires can be asked to use hand held devices to automatically update scores.  These scores naturally flash up in the stadium but, with data systems such as those developed by Sportradar, they can also instantly flash up in the betting shops and on to computer screens around the world.

In a world ever more obsessed with sport, this is great for someone who thinks they’ve spotted a diamond or can see a shock coming.  They can back their judgement and bet as the game continues (‘in play’).  Just like stock market traders, they are putting their money where their mouth is and, if their hunches are right, reaping handsome rewards.

The problem comes in that with ever-increased amounts of data comes the potential for (quick and skilful) manipulation of it.  As Sean Ingle notes, if an umpire takes 30 seconds or so to update the score in a tennis game, then that gives someone at the match the chance to place bets whilst the ‘old’ odds are still in place.  The ‘court-sider’ is either placing a bet on something that has already happened or is advising others to do the same.  In worlds of big revenues these time-lapses can make real differences to who wins and how much they win.  It’s also not surprising that some inside tennis (and tennis won’t be alone) look upon it as a chance to make a quick buck.

In corruption terms this is a classic principal/agent challenge.  The paying public provide the funds that help the sport remain viable.  They do this either by going to the events themselves, or prompting sponsors to underwrite them (the events) in the hope that the connection will help them in their business activities. They are the ‘principals’ who, in theory at least, have the power to decide whether tennis as a commercial entity ultimately has a future or not.  The agents – the players, the officials and those who are involved in getting the game played – do their best to provide a genuinely competitive product to appeal to the watching public.

There is, however, always the option of doing things that whilst often insignificant for the final result, undermine the very ethos around which sport is played; deliberately bowling a no ball in cricket, trying to ensure there are a set number of throw ins in a football game and so on.  The agents have, in other words, discretion as to how the game is actually played, and it is often the human touch – the inspirational moments and the mistakes – that make sport what it is.

The challenge for those interested in tackling the corruption that underpins some of the betting scandals is how best to regulate this discretion.  In a world where it is simply expected that people ‘do the right thing’, then there is no problem.  But that is not a world that we can take for granted. Rules, regulations and procedures, however, only ever get us so far in this regard – in the end, decisions are made, actions are taken, and they are, at least in some part, at the discretion of the participants involved.  If they weren’t, we’d be watching robots going through the motions.

What, in other words, do we do when an athlete has a breakdown and loses from a seemingly impregnable position?  Or what do we do when somehow a victory is pulled miraculously from the jaws of defeat?  In the true Corinthian spirit we should applaud all the actors involved and be pleased that sport is providing such great entertainment.

But in a world of dark corners, rapid data flows and lots of money, that Corinthian spirit simply cannot be taken for granted.  The sharp-eyed and unscrupulous will use the discretion that is inherent in all sporting contests to make their living.  Furthermore, we shouldn’t be surprised when they concentrate on (1) sport at slightly lower levels, (2) sports where individuals (as opposed to teams) have rather more leeway to shape outcomes and (3) where data is available in abundance.  An awful lot of sport falls in to those categories.

The world of anti-corruption analysis has long been warning that sport needs to up its game.  A world without corruption is impossible, but a world where sport is a multi-billion pound business needs to adopt the same standards of compliance and oversight as do other global businesses.  As things stands, sports such as tennis are illustrating more or less exactly how not to do that.

By Dan Hough

 

Posted in Sport

The UK makes the top ten in the CPI, but let’s not get too carried away

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Transparency International (TI), the world’s leading anti-corruption NGO, has published the latest edition of its annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). On the face of it, the 2015 CPI shows the UK to be doing rather well. But let’s not get carried away, there’s still plenty of work to be done.

How much corruption exists and which states are best at fighting it? Transparency International, a leading anti-corruption NGO, has developed a way of giving us at least an indication as to what the answers to these questions might be. Every year TI publishes data on perceptions of corruption around the world. The 2015 version, published on 27 January, included 168 countries and territories, with every one being given a score out of 100. The nearer to three figures a country is, the better it is performing. The nearer to zero a country is, the more work it has to do.

As has become the norm, the Nordic countries come out on top – Denmark is in first place (91 points), whilst Finland is second (90) and Sweden third (89). North Korea (8) and Somalia (8), on the other hand, are joint 167th (and last). Over the last 12 months the UK’s performance has improved noticeably. In 2014 Britain registered 78 points for 14th place. In 2015 this improved to 81 points and 10th respectively. Given that it takes time for change to happen, this leap is noticeable, and only a handful of countries can claim to have made more progress than the UK has this year (Czech Republic, Rwanda and Kuwait being good cases in point).

Why the improvement? On the one hand David Cameron’s governments have quietly begun to push a series of anti-corruption initiatives; in December 2014 the UK produced its first anti-corruption plan, for example, and David Cameron has made a number of big speeches where the issue of corruption has come up (see this one in July 2015 in Singapore for arguably the best example). Furthermore, both the Con-LD coalition and the Tory government that has followed it have made a relatively big deal out of tackling thorny issues such as revealing more about who profits from owning companies (so-called ‘beneficial ownership’).  The UK Prime Minister is also trying to mobilise international support for his anti-corruption agenda, and this will come to a head at a global anti-corruption summit in London in May 2016.  All of this is positive and, slowly but surely, the UK is making a name for itself as a real anti-corruption advocate.

We do, however, still need to be careful in reading too much in to all of this.  That’s so for two reasons. On the one hand the CPI is certainly not without its critics, and there are sound reasons not to take its findings too seriously. On the other hand the UK still faces a host of corruption challenges, and some hard yards lie ahead if these challenges are going to be met.

In terms of the CPI, it’s not clear that the results actually reflect the reality on the ground. Boiling down perceptions of corruption to one solitary number is undoubtedly an overly simplistic way of assessing the amount of corruption that is perceived to exist. Plus, in complex societies the types of corruption that financial centres such as the City of London face are likely to be altogether different to those facing, say, rural communities in northern Scotland.

Secondly, the CPI doesn’t even claim to measure what is really going on; TI, on the contrary, is always quick to claim that it measures perceived and not actual levels of corruption. Whilst knowing how people view problems is undoubtedly useful, it’s not the same as knowing what is actually going on. A nuance that can be lost all too quickly.

Respondents to the surveys included in the CPI are also left to define corruption for themselves. Practically, this makes sense, but it will of course mean that different people will be responding to a phenomenon that they could quite plausibly understand in different ways. Finally, the CPI also claims to concentrate solely on public sector corruption. That’s fine as far as it goes, but what of the regular stream of private sector indiscretions? Think Libor, think VW emissions, think GSK. The corrupt acts of private sector firms and individuals have impacts on the wider public (in these cases on the interest rates you pay, the air you breathe and the cost of the drugs that you need when you’re ill) and yet they are purposefully avoided.

So what should we make of the UK’s apparent anti-corruption success story? On the one hand, the CPI should never be taken too seriously. It has too many flaws for that. But paradoxically it may well be precisely these flaws that make people think a bit more and dig a bit deeper to work out what really is going on. In the case of the UK that digging will lead to a Prime Minister who does seem keen to make progress in this area. That doesn’t mean that the UK is sailing in tranquil waters; on the contrary, it should prompt us to engage with the challenge of, say, dealing with the money-laundering that goes through the UK’s outsized financial services sector and the open data agenda. If the CPI makes even a small contribution to helping us make progress there, then it is a parlour game worth persevering with.

Dan Hough

University of Sussex

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The EITI and the challenge of transparency

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The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) has now been around for well over a decade (see here for more on the EITI’s history).  Formed as a response to the much vaunted ‘resource curse’, the EITI has developed a position for itself as an important and innovative actor in the fight against natural resource-focussed corruption.  Indeed, it leads the way in developing consultative processes for more openness in the oil, gas and mining sectors.

The EITI board met for the 31st time in Kiev from 7th– 10th December 2015.  And, there was important (internal) business to hand.  There are important changes happening within the EITI, one of which being the appointment of a new chair to continue the work of former UK politician Clair Short.

Fredrik Reinfeldt, the former Swedish Prime Minister (2006-2014), has now taken up his post as her successor.  On doing this he made an upbeat speech, claiming that he was “thrilled to be nominated as the next Chair of the EITI”.   He further added that “questions about openness, transparency and accountability have always been close to my heart” and that he was passionate about seeing natural resources “used in an equitable manner for the benefit of all citizens”.  

Reinfeldt will have plenty to keep him busy.  One of his first tasks will be to oversee the (s)election of new members to the EITI board in 2016 and shortly after that to co-ordinate and lead the EITI Global Conference in Peru (see here).

The challenges that led to the creation of the EITI remain every bit as significant now as they were back then.  The aim of improving transparency in the extractive industries is as important for developed countries as it is for less developed countries. In the USA, for example, big players such as Exxon Mobil Corp have not shared information about the taxes they pay at home, and that even though the company is a member of the EITI US Multi-Stakeholder Group (MSG). Indeed Exxon is one of several energy companies that has failed to share U.S. specific tax information for a recent report released by the EITI.

There is another potentially serious challenge facing the new chair, the board and the EITI secretariat in Oslo. Clare Short highlighted the issue in her November Newsletter before she handed over to Reinfeldt:

“The issue for the EITI is whether we should make something compulsory and set up many countries to fail or whether we should continue to encourage all countries to make progress.  The real issue is how the EITI should build on the work so far to encourage continuing progress towards the EITI Principles in all countries” 

Civil society groups, one third of the voting members of the EITI board, have been uncompromising in pursuing this relatively hard-line aim at a time when the chair believed more diplomacy was needed. Some London based ‘transnational advocacy non-governmental groups’ (TANGOs) have regularly blocked pleas from the board and industries to allow more time for some countries, such as Azerbaijan, to provide company and tax information to the EITI.

For those not quite so familiar with the EITI’s procedures, membership is often critically important to less economically developed countries (even with natural resources) not least because membership is also a qualification for international aid from the World Bank.

On the other hand London based TANGOs set standards for other MSGs around the world. Recently, for example, they introduced new guidelines for the disclosure of Beneficial Ownership information in UK extractive industries. This was first accepted by members at the UK EITI MSG last year and it has now been accepted by the EITI board:

EITI civil society organisations are normally expected to affiliate to Publish What You Pay (PWYP), an offshoot of Global Witness (GW created PWYP in 2002). Some NGOs, one a former affiliate of PWYP in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are nonetheless now applying directly to Oslo for associate membership of the EITI. This may also lead to opportunities for them to apply independently of PWYP for EITI board membership (for more on PWYP’s selection criteria for EITI board membership see here).

The EITI, as is evident from the above, is evolving. It might subsequently be worth keeping a closer eye on it in years to come.

 

Martin Brown

University of Sussex

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On collision course: anti-corruption in Tanzania under Magufuli

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Nicknamed the ‘bulldozer’, Pombe Magufuli is fast becoming a proverbial knight in shining armour just weeks after he was sworn-in as the fifth president of Tanzania. His radical approach to public service reform, economic austerity and anti-corruption is being hailed across the African continent and has been a subject of viral memes on twitter.

A day after he was inaugurated, for example, the president took an unannounced and unguided tour of one of the national hospitals, and finding it in a shocking state – with patients sleeping on the hard floor and vital diagnosis machines broken – fired the board and acting director there and then (see here). In another surprise visit by Magufuli’s new Prime Minister, Kassim Majaliwa, to the port in Dar es Salaam, it was discovered that taxes amounting to 40 million USD had not been paid. The president immediately suspended the Tanzania Revenue Authority’s (TRA) Commissioner General and had him arrested together with five other top TRA officials.

Magufuli has also banned business class travels for all public officers except the President, Vice President and Prime Minister, introduced significant cuts in tax exemptions and replaced the often lavish national independence celebrations with a nation-wide clean-up campaign. He has promised zero-tolerance for corruption and ordered the creation of a special court for corruption cases (see here).

These unconventional methods raise some interesting issues concerning the fight against the endemic graft that has dogged the African continent in the past 40 years.

One argument is that when corruption is entrenched and normalised, as it is believed to be the case in Tanzania, such an abrupt intervention is critical. The radical approach can introduce ‘uncertainty’ in the corruption-prone environment, breaking the shared expectations and resulting predictability that sustain corrupt systems. The chain of corruption can be broken, albeit temporarily, when potential wrongdoers are unable to anticipate the type of response their actions will elicit from the top political echelons.

Additionally, the abrupt crackdown on corruption can instil fear among the ‘usual’ offenders working in cahoots that often straddle the private sector and government. This is already happening in Nigeria where the fear of the new president, Muhammadu Buhari, is said to ‘be whipping [the] Nigerian bureaucracy into shape’ (see here). Indeed, instilling fear was one of the important weapons in the anti-corruption arsenal of Singapore under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew. When he was quizzed about his fear-instilling methods, Yew once remarked: “Between being loved and being feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, I’m meaningless.”

But Yew seemed to understand that healing the cancer of corruption requires a careful combination of fear, voluntary compliance by public officials and broad-based community involvement. In addition to raising salaries of public officials, there were efforts to encourage the Singaporean public to be vigilant and to take full ownership of the war on corruption. Incidentally, the consistent show of political will and commitment to fight corruption is a decisive short-cut to winning the hearts and minds of the citizens to rally behind an anti-corruption campaign. A genuine commitment to tackling corruption by a country’s number 1 can inspire a badly needed citizens-led anticorruption movement and become the single most important bulwark for the islands of integrity or the so-called ‘positive-outliers’ in Tanzania.

The challenge is, however, that the political conditions that exist in Tanzania may not be conducive for the Singaporean approach to anti-corruption. Lee Kuan Yew could literally go after anyone suspected of corruption without risking his political career; he could afford to step on big toes and still remain in power. Being the most popular figure in his People’s Action Party (PAP), and in Singaporean politics in general, Lee was relatively unencumbered by political machinations, a luxury that Magufuli on the other hand can only dream of. Although he is credited with being one of the most consistently well performing ministers, is relatively young (55 years old) and has a chemistry PhD, Magufuli was not his party’s (Chama Cha Mapinduzi) first choice. He owes his nomination to the alleged fall-out between the party’s top brass and the former Prime Minister, Ngoyai Lowassa, who was more popular and viewed as the strongest contender.

While Magufuli’s impressively ‘clean’ record during his tenure as the minister of Public Works demonstrates his commitment to integrity, and lends credence to his anti-corruption drive, one wonders whether he has the political wherewithal to take on the big wigs of the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) when the need arises. He might be ‘clean’ but some influential members of the CCM may have put their hands in the cookie jar; can the president remain true to his word and crack the whip without fear and favour?

For someone who started so brightly, showing prejudice in an anti-corruption clampdown can cause more damage than was ever inflicted by all the former presidents combined. It has the potential to generate more cynicism among the ordinary Tanzanians who have pinned their hopes on him to take the country forward.

In the context of multi-party pluralism, the war on endemic corruption can never be a one man show. The new president needs to find strong allies within the CCM and the bureaucracy. The former is more urgent. Intra-party collective action against corruption will sustain the momentum and ensure that other arms of state, especially the judiciary, take anti-corruption much more seriously. But where the incentives for intra-party anticorruption collective action will come from is, so far, an enigma. Why should the CCM be more committed to the war on corruption now than ever before?

Moletsane Monyake, University of Sussex

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German party finance; from the sublime to the ridiculous

Posted on by Jolyon Cooper-Millar — No Comments ↓

Strange things have recently been afoot in the normally sanguine world of German party finance.   Back in October 2014 the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a new(ish) right-wing party, mutated in to a gold selling business so as to claim extra funds from the state (see here). This was quickly followed in December 2014 by ‘Die Partei’, a satirical party with one MEP (see here), deciding that it would take the oddness one step further. It began selling money to help it access public funds to which it otherwise wouldn’t have been entitled (see here for an English language summary of both cases).

By December 2015 the sublime was turning in to the ridiculous. The AfD was once again involved, although this time unwillingly. Despite a year marked by internal strife (see here), the AfD was flying high in the polls. Indeed, for the first time in its history it was registering around the ten per cent mark as it looked to make the most out of not only the Eurocrisis but also Europe’s summer of immigration trauma (see here for more on the AfD’s rise).

The AfD’s successes were clearly too much for some of its opponents. Members of ‘Die Partei’ (yes, them again) and a number of small, left-wing activists launched a campaign on the internet (see here) that had the potential to financially ruin the AfD. Not content with opposing the AfD’s policy package they called on the AfD’s opponents to donate money to the party.   How, one might ask, would donating money to a party potentially cause it problems? Surely the more money a party has, the easier it is for it to carry out its daily affairs? No, not always.

How was the ruse going to work? Anti-AfD Germans were asked to donate small amounts to the AfD – the numbers in play couldn’t get much smaller, in fact, with 10 cents being the amount mentioned. They were asked to do this online, by transferring money via companies such as PayPal or Sofort (simply a German version of PayPal). Every time a payment is made via one of these providers, the receiver (in this case the AfD) has to pay a commission. This varies from provider to provider, but Der Spiegel (Germany’s largest weekly newspaper) reported that the costs tend to be between 0.9 and 1.9 per cent of the value of the transaction (see here). On top of that every transaction comes with a flat fee – again this varies, but it’s generally between 25 and 35 cents.

So, in theory, a 10 cent donation could cost the AfD roughly 30 cents. The AfD would be able to claim back some of this via the system of state subsidies, but not enough to cover the transaction charges. For every Euro that the AfD raises it gets 38 cents from the state – it doesn’t take an expert in arithmetic to work out that that would still leave the party well short of being able to cover the costs that come with these donations.

On the one hand, the AfD reacted in a reasonably relaxed fashion to the threat of death by donations. It claimed, for example, that it had good relationships with the likes of PayPal and Sofort and that the contracts it signed forbad charges from being levied that were greater than the transactions involved. If that’s true, then the AfD is indeed covered and has nothing to worry about. Indeed, a few clever-dick activists trying to bring a party down can often help a party make itself look like it’s the victim of a campaign, and that can go down very well with potential supporters. A case of all attention being good attention, maybe.

On the other hand, if all really is that sanguine then one wonders why the AfD has threatened to take legal action against those pushing the initiative. The background to these concerns is quite complicated, but in essence the AfD is worried about hacking campaigns and data management. Come what may, the party made it clear that if any of these ‘campaigns’ are seen to help the AfD’s opponents undermine its online presence, then the AfD is clear about who it will be holding responsible.

Huffing and puffing to one side, all of this might ultimately be of little real relevance anyway.  By 11 December it was being claimed that the princely sum of Euro 167.23 had been donated in this fashion, hardly the stuff of which financial ruin is made.  But, for a party where money is very tight (see here for more on that), it’s clear that the insurgency is nonetheless an awkward distraction.

The sight of Germans ruthlessly applying rules in absurdum is in and of itself mildly amusing, but these cases also tell us a little more about what we should and shouldn’t expect from party-funding debates. The German party-funding regime is short on neither laws nor judicial attempts to interpret them, but that hasn’t saved it from parties and activists trying  to ‘play the game’. Party funding regimes never stand still as rational actors do their level best to get the most out of them – or indeed to attack their opponents via them if they can.

In and of itself it is unlikely that the AfD will fall apart at the seams on account of these donations, but it does show us that creative souls will use loopholes to further their own interests.  Sometimes in a decidedly comical way, but sometimes in potentially more serious ones.  One good reason to keep an eye on developments in funding regimes (in Germany and beyond) in the years to come.

Dan Hough

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The thing about football is that it’s not just about FIFA…

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Of late Sepp Blatter and his pals at FIFA have – quite understandably – been the centre of attention for anti-corruption scholars and football fans alike.  Indeed, an indictment from the US Department of Justice earlier this year has thrown world football’s governing body in to turmoil.

But as FIFA continues to buckle under the weight of its own scandals, the reputations of the 209 national associations that make up the organisation have largely remained intact. This is decidedly curious as FIFA is not the only organisation within football that suffers from governance problems.

A report recently published by Transparency International (TI) tries to redress this imbalance. The Transparency International Football Governance League Table looks at how transparent each of FIFA’s member football associations (FAs) are.  It unpacks whether they publish financial reports, activity reports, codes of ethics or conduct for their staff, and their organisational statutes on their websites.

By doing this TI are deliberately setting the bar very low. Good governance will involve much more than simply producing, and making publicly available, these documents.  Yet it might not be entirely surprising that even at this low level, the world’s FAs still do very badly. 81 per cent published no financial information, and 85 per cent publish no information on their activities. Russia, the hosts of the World Cup in 2018, do not publish any information on their finances or activities, and Qatar, the, to put it mildly, rather controversial host of the 2022 World Cup, publish precisely none of the documents listed above. In fact, only 14 out of 209 FAs publish all of the information that is listed above (Canada, Denmark, England, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Norway, Portugal, the Republic of Ireland and Sweden, in case you are interested).

But so what? Why does this actually matter?

Well, firstly, the FAs get a lot of money from FIFA. This money comes directly from fans of the game, either from direct ticket and merchandise sales, or because huge sponsors like Coca Cola and Adidas have invested money in order to piggy back on the huge audiences that football can attract. As well as getting millions from FIFA, many FAs also receive money directly from their national governments. If FAs don’t report how their money is spent, the opportunity for executives to potentially skim money into his/her own private yacht fund without being caught is much higher. Fans deserve to see how money that should be used to improve facilities and football in their country is spent, particularly when it comes directly from their own pockets.

Secondly, these FAs hold the power between them to elect FIFA’s president, and also vote to approve any potential reforms to FIFA’s internal dealings. These 209 organisations – who, as is illustrated here, are no great shakes when it comes to their own governance – have a vital role in helping to reform FIFA. That is a sobering thought, and makes one wonder if any change is likely to be achieved at all if it is left solely up to members of the ‘football family’.

Finally, whilst FIFA may be football’s top-dogs, each FA ultimately has control over how football is run in their own country. Can these organisations be trusted to hold the best interest of the game above their own self-interest? At the moment, they are so secretive that it is impossible to say for certain that they can. And this, ultimately, is the point. FAs take money from the people, and are supposed to act to benefit them by safeguarding and developing the sport in their territories. But without transparency, to allow for fans and the people to hold them to account, question marks will always remain about the work that they do.

Is there anything that can be done?

Well, frankly, that depends on how much faith one has. Another recent publication from TI discusses some of the things that FAs can do to improve their internal governance. These recommendations are similar to those being recommended to FIFA; term limits on leadership, some form of externally driven oversight, proper accountability, and, crucially, transparency.

At the moment, though, FAs are under little pressure to get their houses in order. At the same time as FIFA is coming under mounting pressure from groups like TI and NewFIFANow, the FAs receive much less attention. Reform at FIFA is of paramount importance, clearly, but in order to make sure that that change sticks, and that the game of football can continue to inspire millions around the world, comprehensive reform must also take place in each of the 209 football associations.

Ben Wheatland

Transparency International Secretariat

Posted in FIFA, Sport

The challenge of armchair auditing

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In August 2010 the then Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, announced that he wanted to empower “an army of armchair auditors” to scrutinise the work of his department.  This move would signal the beginning of a “new era” of government transparency and accountability with any outgoings of £500 or more being publicly revealed online. The wider world was subsequently going to have access the nuts and bolts of how in excess of £300m (the departmental budget in 2010) was being spent.

And this was clearly only meant to be the start of things.  David Cameron’s Conservative/Liberal Democratic government embraced this new world of openness and accountability, opening up information on a whole range of things from crime statistics to spending commitments and from contract awarding to hospital waiting lists.  This new openness would not only help to clamp down on waste, but it would also drive both efficiency and responsiveness (see here).

Furthermore, the government promised to develop a system of performance management based around a range of performance indicators.  The 200 plus indicators would be an ideal tool for the public to hold those with entrusted power to account.   This was, or so it seemed, bordering on the revolutionary.  Engaged citizens would be able to unpack and dissect the minutiae of government performance and the age of Sir Humphreys pulling the strings facelessly from behind a cloak of anonymity would be behind us.

How, then, has this veritable army of auditors faired?  And how has government and the process of governing changed as a result?  The answer to the first question gives a very strong steer as to the answer to the second; impressive though the brave new world sounds, the army has not so much organised a mutiny as never really enrolled in the first place.  There are one or two notable, and quite specific, exceptions (see here and here), but as Ben Worthy and Robyn Munro have argued, there are plenty of good reasons why one can’t really blame prospective armchair auditors for falling at the first hurdle.

A recent report by the Institute for Government (IoG) outlines three specific reasons why this drive to increase people power has at best moved forward only patchily.  The IoG boils it down to poor quality data, poor communication (understood as inadequate explanations of what the data means) and very little evidence that there was any great public willingness to use the system in the first place.

Whilst the third of these is something that should probably not surprise us too much – minus the pay of a fully trained auditor it can’t be that big a surprise that people aren’t queuing up to be amateur forensic accountants – the existence of the other two problem areas are disappointments.

The IoG, to be fair, was quick to recognise that some government departments (and service providers more broadly) did do their best to be open with both data and explanations of it, but some appeared to take their obligations anything but seriously.  Data was often simply not available, or when it was available it was in a format that was unsearchable or very hard to actually use in any straightforward sense.  A pile of .pdf documents the size (if printed out) of a hefty doorstop might well fulfill transparency obligations, but it is hard to claim that all but the unhealthily obsessed can do anything with these things.

Over the course of the last few months a number of websites and apps have been developed to help make data-sifting easier.  And, more specifically, to enable the interested external observer to uncover potential malpractice.  If you’re interested in public procurement data, for example, then http://www.spendnetwork.com/ is a useful starting point, while https://openspending.org/ claims to ‘track and analyse public financial information globally’.  In November 2015 the University of Sussex and Transparency International UK took a closer look at what these websites and apps might offer, convening a focus group to try and unpack their usefulness.  15 students on the MA in Corruption and Governance plus 3 PhD students on the SCSC’s PhD programme sat down to see what they could make of them.  The students looked to try and uncover potentially interesting transactions or processes in a number of the UK’s local authorities.  They used the websites to help them, as well as conventional search engines such as google.  The aim was to see if an interested observer could find anything of note.

The outcome was predictable; the students found little of genuine substance.  On the one hand, the data remains both patchy and largely impenetrable.  The numbers mean little to those who don’t understand the context, and there is effectively nothing out there explaining why decisions were made, specific contracts awarded and government took the form that it did.  On the other hand, unless an armchair auditor possesses the talents of Lieutenant Colombo, the patience of a saint and, perhaps most importantly, some sort of tip or piece of inside information to help them head in the right direction, then he or she won’t be able to make much progress at all.  As one of the MA students, Koya Rahman, noted “I spent 90 minutes looking hard at all of this, but, in truth, if I’d been at home and not part of this experiment I’d have given up after 10 minutes”.  Who can blame her?

Perhaps it is nonetheless too soon to be so downbeat about people power in this area.  The rise of the open data agenda and the existence of a number of initiatives to both broaden its scope and streamline the processes that underpin it mean that things may look very different in the near(ish) future.  David Cameron, to be fair, does seem to have embraced the agenda rather more than many of his international contemporaries.  But, the devil really is in the detail, and unless both the IT infrastructure of the public sector can be improved and the accessibility of the data is enhanced then armchair auditing will remain the privilege of the (very) few.

Dan Hough

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The challenge of dealing with military corruption in Nigeria

Posted on by Jolyon Cooper-Millar — 1 Comment ↓

Colonel Sambo Dasuki, the former National Security Adviser to the Federal Government of Nigeria, is waiting to go on trial for corruption in the richest, most populated and many think the most corrupt country in Africa. This story (see here for more) is not in the same league as the case of Sani Abacha, a former corrupt General and President of Nigeria who stole billions, but it is still serious.

Dasuki was high on the new(ish) Nigerian president, General Mohammadu Buhari’s, hit list, and one of the first people to be charged with corruption when he took office in April. Buhari made it clear to the world that security and corruption were his first two national policy priorities and he wanted to be seen to act on both early on. That led to Dasuki quickly being put under house arrest.

Dasuki had played a prominent role in helping to destroy public faith in Nigeria’s once internationally respected army and it is to be hoped that the trial will shed more light on exactly how he did this. Buhari certainly thinks that Dasuki knows much more about large-scale corruption in the military and the theft of money than he will admit. This is money that was meant to help ordinary soldiers fight terrorists in the North-East of Nigeria, on the borders with Chad and Cameroon.

For his part, Dasuki had been the senior military officer responsible for advising President Goodluck Jonathan about national security and spending on the armed forces.  It appears that he had advised him of the need for a massively increased budget for the army in 2014 – all well and good, but, again, where precisely did all that money go? There is very little evidence that it was spent on new equipment, much needed weapons or vehicles (see here).

Dasuki’s job had also been to explain what the military were doing to fight terrorism, and, as became increasingly clear, to push any blame for failure on the part of the government on to others such as the main opposition party, the All Progressive Congress (APC).  The APC are dominant in the northern states of Nigeria where Boko Haram are most active and so are very much in the middle of Nigeria’s gruesome battle with a hard to pin down terrorist group. The then government’s (and Dasuki’s) argument was that the military could not defeat Boko Haram while APC Governors in the northern states supported Boko Haram and undermined President Goodluck Jonathan. This was a serious accusation that was understandably not taken lying down by the APC whose reputation was on the line in the run up to a national election in March 2015.

It also looked as if Dasuki may have gained traction in the UK with his defence of the Nigerian military’s obvious failure in the north, and his thinly veiled accusation against the APC. In the UK Parliament, for example, Andrew Rosindell MP asked the then UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague, how the UK was engaging with Nigeria’s leading opposition party (the APC).  This followed a debate in parliament in which Labour MP Sandra Osborne sought to examine allegations of links between the APC and Boko Haram (see here).

Was the APC part of a conspiracy funded by the northern states? Lai Mohammed, APC Press Secretary (and now Minister of Information), came to London at very short notice in September 2014 to argue the opposite case in the UK Parliament (see here for his reply to Dasuki). Dasuki’s pamphlets, meanwhile, describing how Boko Haram had increased its’ operations, were distributed by Nigerian Consulate officials in Portcullis House during Lai Mohammed’s speech.  Quite where this will all end is not clear, but it is a story that is worth following.  The trial is ongoing in Nigeria and this episode will tell us more about how the new president intends to deal with serious corruption allegations in the military.

Martin Brown

MA Student

Sussex Centre for the Study of Corruption (SCSC)

 

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