Centre for the Study of Corruption

Dr Sam Power, Lecturer in Corruption Analysis at the Centre for the Study of Corruption, University of Sussex has co-authored a new report on election financing during the UK 2019 General Election. The International IDEA report was co-authored with Dr Kate Dommett, University of Sheffield; Dr Amber Macintyre, Royal Holloway; and Dr Andrew Barclay, University of Sheffield. The report finds that many types of campaign activity, especially digital campaigning, is not reflected in spending categories and that different political parties are not consistently coding the same activity under the same category.

This article was originally published on the International IDEA Blog on 15 June 2022.

While the the United Kingdom is often considered to have one of the most transparent political finance systems, it is still unclear how more than 1 in every GBP 10 was spent at the last UK general election. This is one of many findings from the International IDEA’s latest report, ‘Regulating the Business of Election Campaigns: Financial Transparency in the Influence Ecosystem in the United Kingdom‘, which investigates the companies, suppliers and individuals that political parties spend money on.

Getting to grips with the flow of money in politics is essential for understanding how the wider influence ecosystem at elections operates. Suppliers consult on election messaging and polling, provide social media tools and devise large-scale advertising campaigns. And as the Cambridge Analytica Scandal showed—such services during election campaigns matter and can be the cause of great public concern.

Mapping the influence ecosystem at elections – new trends and old realities

The new report looks at the UK as a case study to begin mapping this terrain. The country has one of the most transparent political finance regimes in the world. One of the particularly novel regulations is that if a political party spends over GBP 200 on anything at an election, they are required to provide an invoice from the supplier. These invoices are then released, with other details of election spending, on the Electoral Commission’s political finance database. By going through every invoice, and manually coding the service provided into new categories, the report confirmed much that was either assumed or found things that simply were not known about election campaigning in 2019.

For example, much has been written about digital advertising and, indeed, the democratic implications of the increased use of the online space. But the UK Electoral Commission’s political finance database is yet to capture how prevalent these trends are. There is no category for ‘online’, or ‘social media’ advertising. There is simply a catch-all ‘advertising’ designation. This means that researchers attempting to gauge the extent to which advertising occurs online had to previously rely on (very educated) guesswork, often based on keyword searches for prominent examples of companies (like Facebook and Google). This neglects that other suppliers (like consultants or advertising agencies) may—as a part of the service they provide—place online ads. The report found that of the over GBP 10 million that was spent on advertising, 73 per cent was done online. And over 50 per cent of this was on social media ads specifically. This suggests, for anyone thinking about how to regulate modern political advertising, online is key.

And yet, old realities still matter. Lost amongst some of the more alarmist perceptions of this new political world is that campaigning is still very much a ground game. The Internet is not the only fruit. In fact, by far the most prominent form of spending by parties—coming in at over GBP 21 million—was through campaign materials. This includes printing posters, leaflets and leaflet delivery which make up just over 40 per cent of all spend. That is not to say that online trends aren’t concerning. A little money can go a long way at elections as it is much cheaper to advertise online. Likewise, the GBP 50,000 spent on a campaign consultant might form the message which is then put out in a GBP 2 million leaflet drop (and targeted to certain demographics on Facebook). But the fact remains, most election spend is on incredibly functional—and much less immediately newsworthy—services.

What is unclear?

Despite all this, there is much that the report cannot fully capture. During the project, the research team placed all invoices that they couldn’t categorise into a separate ‘unclear’ heading. This might happen for several reasons. It might be that a blank invoice was submitted, or no invoice was provided at all. Some were blurry, and one even had a post-it note over the description of the service. Finally, there were some that would be so vague as to be useless—like the invoice that was for ‘persuasive and shareable content for the general elections’. Whilst some of these are, of course, more unclear than others, this remains a problem. It is impossible to tell exactly what 14 per cent of total election expenditure in 2019 was spent—that is a GBP 6.6 million black hole.

What can be done?

This matters. It is currently possible to provide very little meaningful information about services, or to deliberately abstract the information that political parties disclose. Therefore, it is impossible to make a reasonable judgement about what is, or is not, a problematic democratic practice. The report suggests a number of actionable legislative reforms that should be introduced to address these transparency deficits. The categories that are used in the Electoral Commission’s database should be updated to better reflect the realities of modern campaigns, particularly as it relates to digital advertising. More should also be done to standardise invoicing practice to reduce the possibility of genuine error or deliberate obfuscation. These are small reforms that will have a big effect. They will embed the UK’s reputation as a model of best practice. More importantly, they will allow the public to better understand how elections are changing—and map the actors that operate within the wider influence ecosystem—to more carefully diagnose any larger, perhaps more existential, democratic concerns.

Political finance transparency plays a key role in safeguarding the integrity of political processes and institutions. International IDEA is committed to supporting countries in developing digital solutions for political finance reporting and disclosure and to conduct in-depth country case studies in advancing the evidence-based global policy debate for better political finance transparency.

International IDEA’s report “Regulating the Business of Election Campaigns: Financial Transparency in the Influence Ecosystem in the United Kingdom” was drafted by a team of UK experts, led by Dr Kate Dommett (University of Sheffield) and Dr Sam Power (Centre for the Study of Corruption, University of Sussex), in collaboration with the Institute’s Money in Politics Programme. The report is available at the following link.

Mark Knights, Professor of History at the University of Warwick, uses pre-twentieth century historical data to examine Britain’s long struggle with corruption and what can be learned from it today. Knights writes that anti-corruption is not always a linear journey and that good governance rests on the difficult task of finding the right balance between the necessary trust given to officials and the distrust required to scrutinise and constrain any abuse of that trust

In my recently published book Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire 1600-1850 I examine Britain’s long struggle with corruption during a key stage in the formation of the state and empire. Social scientists don’t often use historical data – and even more rarely anything before the twentieth century – but they should, since there are lessons to be gleaned from it. This blog tries to lay some of those out (and further analysis can be found here).  

History suggests that anti-corruption is a long-term process, consisting of multiple moments of reform rather than a single ‘big bang’. Britain took about 250 years to move towards a recognisably ‘modern’ framework. The pace of reform accelerated after 1780 but the advances then rested on much earlier changes, innovations and debates. So it’s worth thinking hard about the factors that prevent change.  

Britain’s example (replicated elsewhere) suggests that socio-cultural factors such as friendship, gift-giving, kinship and patronage are deeply embedded, lead to cronyism and capture of institutions, are hard to shift and mean that the boundary between licit and illicit behaviour is often shifting and difficult to define. Clarifying such boundaries, and societal norms more generally, is more than a top-down process of regulation – it also requires extensive public debate and even contest. That debate took place in Britain in a relatively free press from the seventeenth century onwards, something that was vital for a national conversation about ethics (even if this frequently centred on corruption as ‘scandal’). Without ethical conviction, rules were disregarded or evaded (as was repeatedly shown in domestic and imperial contexts).  

Public pressure was also important in prompting top-down action – in the 1640s, 1690s, 1780s, 1830s the state responded to popular pressure. Much of that agitation resulted from macro factors such as war, which forced governments to raise taxation and increased a public desire to scrutinise how the money was spent, and periods of ‘moral renewal’, when religious sensibilities accelerated secular action.  

State-formation is also a slow process. Indeed, for much of the pre-modern period the state was not a purely public entity but was reliant on private agents to deliver its objectives, such as justice and war. Hybrid public-private entities abounded: the East India Company, which created an eastern empire, was a private company given a state monopoly, and at home even jails were semi-private institutions, run by governors who were allowed to profit from their prisoners. Spelling out the dividing line between public and private was a process that took time – and was often calibrated through gross violations of what the public or government or a corporation saw as acceptable levels of profit for the semi-private agents, even if what was ‘acceptable’ was a key point of debate. 

History also suggests that we might want to think about systems of corruption as well as individual or institutional failings. The concept of ‘systems’ first arose in the seventeenth century when it was applied to astronomy, music, the body, religion and eventually to politics too. In the eighteenth century commentators started talking about a ‘system of corruption’ and ‘corrupt systems’. A systems approach saw different fields as interacting: the corrupt parliamentary system rested on a corrupt financial system which funded corrupt wars which a corrupt elite used to feather their own nest. Many critics became convinced that corruption needed to be seen in the round rather than piecemeal, an idea that seems worth more attention. If today you leave the financial system out of reform, for example, you’ll neglect an important part of the interlocking pieces.  

Other important terms, such as ‘interest’ and ‘trust’ similarly took off in the seventeenth century, enabling the development of ideas such as ‘conflict of interest’ and ‘breach of trust’. Trust is a particularly important notion in Britain’s corruption history, since it was a legal concept that moved from private estate law to public law, as a way of describing the obligations of office-holding. Trust required duties of selflessness, accountability, integrity and care that we now see as central to the standards required in public life. The wider point is that legal cultures really matter and shape how anti-corruption both evolves and is conceived (and hence also that different cultures will mean that anti-corruption has to be fitted to local contexts). Trust has also to be balanced by a measure of distrust, effected through formal means (national accounting bodies, for example) and informal means (through whistleblowers and the press). The art of good government rests on finding the right balance between the necessary trust given to officials and the distrust required to scrutinise and constrain any abuse of that trust. That’s a challenging task that needs constant reflection. It was certainly something the eluded politicians in Britain for several centuries. 

Anti-corruption is often highly political, in many senses of the word. It was often used in British history to pursue personal, group and partisan interests. So we should ask what political (and indeed social, economic and cultural) work the allegation of corruption is doing at any one time and who or what benefits from it. Partisanship, in the British case, was a mixed blessing – on the one hand, it helped expose and pursue corruption, but on the other it often narrowed the debate away from systemic issues, polarised resistance to change and was dismissed as motivated by self-interest. Yet political support for non-partisan solutions was essential. The 1780s commission for public accounts, which formulated many principles that are recognisably the maxims of modern anti-corruption (officials should put aside their self-interest and have their public duty uppermost; they should separate private and public interests; they should not charge arbitrary fees for their services; they should properly account for public money) was not composed of politicians but had the support of the governments of the day, which needed to satisfy the public clamour for reform. Non-partisan commissions with political backing can be effective.  

Finally, history suggests that anti-corruption is not always linear, with a threshold which, once passed, will always be maintained. For example, the parliamentary accounts committee, set up to make public expenditure more accountable, was abandoned after 1714 and not restored until 1780; and even now we seem to be retreating back into eighteenth century cronyism, patronage, conflicts of interest and the erosion of hard-fought principles and values. If that is right, we would do well to reflect on Britain’s long and painful struggle with corruption and learn its lessons. 

Professor Liz Dávid-Barrett, the Director of the Centre for the Study of Corruption at the University of Sussex, and Slobodan Tomić, Lecturer in Public Management at the University of York examine how and why transnational investigative journalism has become an important tool in combatting grand corruption.

This blog post was originally published by the Global Anticorruption Blog.

Over the last decade, investigative journalists have broken a series of blockbuster stories on financial secrecy and illicit financial flows. These clusters of stories have typically been based on, and named after, leaked documents and data from law firms, financial institutions, or government agencies: LuxLeaks (2014), SwissLeaks (2015), the Panama Papers (2016), the Paradise Papers (2017), the FinCEN Files (2020), the Pandora Papers (2021), and, most recently, Suisse Secrets (2022). One of the remarkable things about each of these cases is that they involved not a single story or series of stories by a single media outlet in a single country, but rather were the product of a transnational collaboration of a network of investigative journalists. It has always been the case that investigative journalism has been a vital tool for exposing and deterring corruption. But what we seem to be seeing now is the emergence of a transnational coalition of journalists that is sufficiently agile, dynamic, and capable of working across borders to be a match for the perpetrators of grand corruption, money laundering, and other forms of organized crime.

Indeed, these transnational networks of investigative journalists can be seen as a new institution of global governance. Yet their emergence presents a series of puzzles. How have they overcome the difficulties that plague law enforcement when they try to act transnationally? How have journalists learned to trust one another in handling sensitive data, and to have faith that their colleagues will hold off on publishing until the agreed date? In addition to questions like these, the emergence of transnational networks of investigative journalists raises a broader question: What does this new form of global governance add to our collective efforts to tackle grand corruption?

With support from the UK government’s Serious Organised Crime and Anti-Corruption Evidence (SOC ACE) programme, we have been investigating these questions, principally through interviews with investigative journalists in Latin America and the Balkans who have participated in these networks. Our research has highlighted three important features of these transnational journalistic networks.

• First, transnational networks of investigative journalism have benefited from a transformed funding model. Indeed, this new form of journalistic cooperation is in some ways a response to the crisis that regular journalism has faced in recent years. A decade ago, investigative journalism—which is resource-intensive and slow work—looked set to die out as the newspaper business crumpled under the strains of free online content. In many countries, local journalism has collapsed because of these market pressures, and the political sensitivity of reporting on corruption made it especially vulnerable to cuts. While it is still hard for local media to finance investigative journalism, transnational investigative networks have through their work demonstrated that they bring public benefit. And that has enabled them to access funding through other methods, including individual donors and international foundations that make grants in line with their broader mission to maintain a free media.
• Second, there has been a shift in the culture of journalism away from a collection of “lone wolves” competing for career-burnishing scoops, and toward a more collaborative and mutually supportive model. That is in part because, as several journalists explained to us, investigating and writing about the perpetrators of grand corruption remains an extremely dangerous business, and transnational cooperation helps reduce the inherent risks of taking on the powerful and well-connected. Part of this risk-mitigation is due to safety in numbers. As one journalist told us, “I lived in a small town and if I was going to publish something by myself on corruption I felt completely unsafe. I didn’t have any support. Once I received a death threat after publishing something. With the transnational work you have a network of support, and it’s not only your name that becomes a target or is connected to a publication, it’s loads of names being connected.” Relatedly, the involvement of many journalists in a network makes it possible for individual journalists who might be at risk if their names are connected to certain stories to shift the story to someone else in the network. If a case is highly sensitive in one country, for example, the network might pass it to someone who does not live there. This approach can also help evade curbs on media freedom. Notably, none of the Suisse Secrets stories have been published under the bylines of Swiss reporters, out of concern that these reporters could be prosecuted under Switzerland’s archaic secrecy laws. Similarly, other journalists have told us that they used transnational networks to get around Nicaragua’s laws against publishing stories based on leaks. Once the story has been published elsewhere, outside the jurisdiction of those laws, a synthesis can more safely be reported in the Nicaraguan media.
• Third, transnational networks of journalists have created new tech tools and developed methods that are helping to build the capacity of the global anticorruption community. The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project has brought together journalists and data scientists to develop an investigative dashboard, called Aleph, that helps journalists all over the world to find company ownership records and other information using data from public records as well as data from past leaks. The networks also sometimes assist with access to tools and data that might be too expensive for small outlets to finance, such as satellite information, export-import figures, and telephone numbers or addresses. Some networks have in-house data scientists to perform sophisticated searches and analyses. This tech revolution also means that it is now much easier for whistleblowers and other sources to contact journalists anonymously and provide them with huge quantities of information in electronic form. Technology also facilitates the use of the investigative journalists’ reports by law enforcement: The journalists’ articles, and the databases on which those stories are based, create an archive that can be useful to law enforcement looking for evidence, especially now that search engines make it easy to find information from the past and connect the dots.

Transnational investigative journalism is now an important part of our global armory against grand corruption. But there are limits to its impact. Journalists can discover corruption schemes, or evidence of them, but they cannot prosecute. Relatively few of the cases of cross-border corruption revealed by even the most spectacular leaks have led to trials and verdicts, because it is eventually up to domestic authorities to prosecute, and that legal process is fraught with obstacles. Similarly, it is not clear that all the great work that journalists do to expose legal gaps and institutional weaknesses is provoking systemic reform. Once public attention subsides, it takes Herculean efforts from the anticorruption community to get governments to consider new regulatory solutions against tax evasion and money laundering. Yet before these networks existed, most cases of cross-border corruption went undiscovered as well as unprosecuted. Transnational networks of investigative journalists provide unsolicited but rigorous narratives linking information and actors, and the evidence they uncover can be used both by the general public and by law enforcement agencies. In doing so, they are performing an essential function in the global fight against grand corruption and illicit finance.

In light of recent scandals involving the British royal family, Professor Robert Barrington examines whether it is appropriate to use the term corruption.

Monarchies are no strangers to corruption. This does not just mean the Tudors or the Habsburgs or the Romanovs. Look around the word today and you will see allegations about the royal families of Spain, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Dubai, to name but a few. So what should we make of recent stories involving the British royal family? Is there corruption at the heart of the British establishment as some in the media claim, or have we seen some one-off poor behaviours from individuals who are too cut off from the world to know better? And, perhaps most crucially, does it matter?

What we are seeing with the royal family is behaviour which is on the borderline of corruption – as well as being potentially criminal. We are certainly seeing absolute failures of integrity. It matters if you think the monarchy matters to the UK, either in terms of national reputation, or as part of the country’s constitution, or perhaps less tangibly as exemplars for the nation’s sense of itself.

The UK has long had an ambivalent relationship with the concept of corruption: happy to point out that it happens abroad, but reluctant to admit that it might happen at home. I will not examine here the long-running theoretical argument that having a rich and privileged unelected monarch alongside a democracy is a form of corruption hardwired in to the constitution- that is a catch-all argument frequently rolled out by those who wish to discredit or abolish the monarchy for other reasons. The focus here is three recent cases:

· Prince Andrew and under-age sex – although in Prince Andrew’s case, there are multiple stories that could be selected, such as the inflated price agreed for the sale of his home to a Kazakh oligarch.

· The Duchess of Cornwall (Camilla)’s nephew and Conservative Party donors.

· Access and honours for donors to Prince Charles’s charities.

In each of these cases, we can apply the definition of ‘abuse of entrusted power for private gain’ to give a sense of whether there has been corruption. There is certainly entrusted power in the monarchy. So we will need to probe the issues of abuse and private gain, and whether the entrusted power extends beyond the Queen and the immediate heir to the throne.

The Prince Andrew case of alleged sex with a trafficked minor would without doubt qualify as abuse. And if you assume that private gain includes personal gratification then you would seem to have a case of corruption (if the allegations are true). But the question of corruption hinges on the notion of entrusted power. If Prince Andrew was having sex, as alleged, was this in his capacity as a person with entrusted power? On the one hand, a Prince (and the associated power) does not stop being a Prince when he takes his clothes off. What might not be corruption as an ordinary citizen, such as for Epstein’s other paedophile friends, might become corruption when an office-holder does the same thing. But on the other hand, even for a public figure, there must be some point at which they are acting in a private capacity. It can still be badly wrong, and prosecutable, without being corruption. Over and above breaking the law, an errant parliamentarian might be charged

with ‘bringing the House into disrepute’, and Prince Andrew’s case is perhaps more akin to ‘bringing the monarchy into disrepute’ than corruption. Whether corruption or not, the sordid episode, compounded by lies and the sense of impunity, is a gross breach of integrity and trust.

As to the sale of his former residence at a surprisingly high price to a Kazakh oligarch, and his subsequent business dealings with Kazakhstan, they also look to be close to the line of corrupt dealings – although as so often with a very untransparent royal family, that is likewise an assessment based on allegation rather than proven fact.

The Duchess of Cornwall (Camilla)’s nephew, Ben Elliot, is co-Chairman of the Conservative party, and runs a ‘concierge’ business that provides exclusive services to wealthy people. The factors that lead us to ask whether there is any corruption at play are the combination of his business activities with his political position and his relationship to the royal family. Did these different things mix, and can this fall under a definition of corruption? A case recently in the news has involved a client of Elliot’s company, who was a Conservative party donor, and whom Elliot also introduced to Prince Charles and Camilla. It is not clear what the client or Prince Charles expected from this; it is clear that Camilla’s nephew was being paid, and was also able to consolidate his political influence through recruiting Conservative party donors. Was this an act of corruption? There is cronyism and the question of whether political donations carry an implied expectation of favours. It is not quite clear who holds the entrusted power (arguably Elliot as a political figure), whether there was an abuse (such as an improper offer of access or reward to the party donor) or whether there was private gain (to what extent did Elliot gain personally?). But it rings all the alarm bells for corruption risk of a very British kind – an out-of-view establishment backscratching which blurs the lines between business, politics and the royal family. It may not be provably corrupt, but it taints the royal family with corruption risk.

And so to the case of Prince Charles’s charities, in which it is alleged an honour was improperly granted to a Saudi businessman who was a donor to the charities, alongside several high-profile Conservative party donors. In this case, the key question is whether an honour was effectively sold. That would be an abuse. The entrusted power lies with Prince Charles, who can ensure people get honours. Was there private gain? For Prince Charles, the gain was for his charitable work. For the Saudi businessman there was the gain of the honour, but it is hardly unusual for philanthropists to be rewarded with honours – and he was not the one abusing his entrusted power. The question of wrongdoing hinges on whether it was quid pro quo: was money paid (albeit for charitable purposes) specifically with the expectation of receiving an honour? We do not yet know. But like the Ben Elliot case, it has the smack of behind the scenes cronysim, a self-serving establishment and the toxic mix of politics, money, honours and the royal family. On the evidence available, it is hard to call it corruption, but is not a good look.

The conclusion in each case is that there is a breach of integrity, and standards, but not necessarily corruption. There is also the common theme of impunity: breaking rules and breaching standards in the expectation of not being held to account. However, like the Johnson government, we must also ask at what point serial wrongdoing, cronyism and abuses of power will add up to institutional corruption, even if no individual act has been proven to be corrupt. There are already too many cases to be considered unfortunate one-

offs, and at minimum there have been serial failures of integrity. It is perilously close to fitting those definitions of institutional corruption, in which an institution’s purpose is diverted to serve those within it.

You may not think this matters. But as we can see from the volumes of press coverage, what the royal family do and say, and their reputation, still has weight. This is both within the UK and – as importantly – overseas, where the Head of State often commands greater respect than whichever government happens to be in power. By virtue of their position in the constitution, and the nation’s reputation, it is a reasonable expectation from citizens – the Queen’s subjects – that her family should be free of corruption. If nothing else, there is some self-interest at play: public and political support for the monarchy cannot be taken for granted. Yet the Queen’s children are balancing dangerously on the borderline of corruption, when they should be safely and clearly on only one side of it. It’s time to clean things up.

Robert Barrington, Professor of Anti-Corruption Practice at the Centre for the Study of Corruption, examines the role of lawyers in facilitating global corruption in the light of the Pandora Papers.  A version of this blog was first published on law.com, following a letter discussing how ‘Britain is damaged by the provision of legal services to dictators’ in the Financial Times.

In the past two years, report after report – from international bodies like the OECD, domestic governments like the U.K. and non-profits like Transparency International – have expressed concerns about lawyers facilitating corruption as ‘professional enablers’. Their message has been reinforced – and evidenced – by the insight into the work of leading law firms granted by the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers and, most recently, the Pandora Papers. Yet only a generation ago, lawyers were seen as champions in the fight against corruption.

However that change has come to pass, it is a problem. Society needs lawyers to be respected as impartial upholders of the rule of law. If lawyers are perceived as putting the interests of their clients, and their ability to earn fees, distinctly and regularly above the interests of justice, public and governmental trust in the system begins to break down.

This is not about the small number of lawyers and firms who deliberately break the law. They are doing wrong, and should be sanctioned. More problematic is the perception that ‘professional enabling’ is widespread among senior lawyers and their top-flight firms. It consists of exploiting loopholes, skirting the fringes of legality, and often just offering standard legal services – but all on behalf of corrupt oligarchs and kleptocrats.

The services are myriad. Sometimes, specially designed for the world’s corrupt elite: reputation laundering, setting up complex webs of shell companies to disguise identities and financial flows, litigating against journalists who may make uncomfortable allegations against their clients. Note that none of this is illegal – these are merely specialist services provided to people of dubious reputation.

Then there are standard legal services. Many of the world’s corrupt elite run large businesses based on state monopolies in their own countries, which expand into overseas M&A or listings – all of which requires legal services. If an oligarch corruptly obtained a privatised state company, but then runs it cleanly, while at the same time using his wealth to prop up a corrupt presidential crony, where precisely is the corruption or the illegality? And if there are only distant and unsubstantiated rumours, they may seem like a very reasonable client to take on.

Much of the focus on professional enablers has arisen from the world’s increased attention to money laundering. But many of those regulations do not apply to the legal profession, and there is an important question here about the legality of the funds. If a kleptocrat has so captured the state that the judiciary and laws are bent to his will, how likely is a conviction?

You can see the problem. Lawyers in major financial centres feel they can legitimately take on clients who have not been convicted in their country of origin. Yet this opens the doors for corrupt oligarchs and kleptocrats to use legal services to cleanse their reputations and put their money in safe havens.

In rare circumstances a kleptocrat is caught out – for example, by being served an Unexplained Wealth Order in the UK. A top legal team will then be at hand. Never mind the likelihood that the kleptocrat is a serial human rights abuser and the money has been misappropriated: everyone surely has a right to a legal team.

As you would expect, the lawyers who act for oligarchs and kleptocrats have a well-honed defence. In fact, three defences: access to justice; innocent until proven guilty; and equality before the law. These are important principles and we neglect them at our peril. But life is not quite that simple. These principles were designed to protect the disadvantaged and downtrodden; they are now also used to protect those who are highly corrupt.

This minefield of legal ethics, which draws its legitimacy from another age, is not fit for purpose in the globalised world. Justice for the overseas kleptocrat in the UK or US may represent a gross injustice to the victims of their corruption back home. How do we relate that to access for justice?

Some of this is not new. Murderers have always needed lawyers to defend them, who have been duly criticised. A mafia boss has always been able to hire a top firm when the cops make an arrest.

Two key things have changed. First, the scene has become much more global. Law firms, with franchises or offices in multiple jurisdictions, must weigh up their reputations and business prospects in multiple markets, not just at home. Taking the moral high ground in New York or London may lead to loss of business in Dubai or Hong Kong. Likewise their clients come from new markets – places like Azerbaijan, from where it would have been inconceivable that large funds would flow into the world’s major financial centres thirty years ago.

Secondly, we all have a much deeper understanding of the nature of kleptocracy and oligarchs and misappropriation of state assets. It is much harder to turn a blind eye and plausibly suggest that vast assets from Equatorial Guinea should be treated on a par with entrepreneurial wealth from Silicon valley.

There are two options to improve the situation. Option one is simple. Laws and regulations should be tightened and enforced, to reign in the worst behaviour, including some which is not currently not illegal.

Option two is to re-invigorate the basis on which the legal profession has been revered for generations: ethical judgement. To start this process, the legal profession needs to accept that there is a problem; but at present there is denial, and merely a tired recycling of those old defences.

However, change can come from within. Junior lawyers who have not yet been forced to make the choice between integrity and a lucrative client; anti-corruption professionals in public and private sector; lawyers in enforcement agencies and parliaments.

They are all members of their industry associations, and could stimulate a review of how the long-standing principles of justice can be used to reinforce rather than undermine the rule of law.