When criminals, kleptocrats, and other corrupt actors seek to launder their ill-gotten wealth, they usually require the assistance of professionals to obscure the funds’ illegitimate origins. These corruption “enablers” may be lawyers who structure corporate vehicles, accountants providing tax planning guidance, bankers investing the money through numbered and offshore accounts, real estate agents handling anonymous cash transactions, or educational and charitable institutions ignoring the criminal source of the fees and donations they receive.  Looking at sub-Saharan Africa alone, it is ..read more

This is a crosspost from OpenOwnership, in response to Jackie Harvey’s research on beneficial ownership policy and legislation in Nigeria.   Beneficial ownership transparency and the fight against grand corruption in Nigeria: The highs and lows of Nigeria’s journey   Introduction Over recent years, Nigeria has made significant strides towards combating illicit financial flows through the use of beneficial ownership transparency. The past few years have seen legislative reforms and concrete efforts by the Nigerian government to put systems in place to implement these. New research fro ..read more

This is a crosspost from the Ratiu Forum blog, a joint initiative by the Ratiu Family Charitable Foundation, the Ratiu Democracy Centre and the London School of Economics IDEAS Think Tank. Let’s talk about religion. And specifically, indulgences. In return for certain activities – such as prayers or pilgrimages – a Catholic believer can receive an indulgence, which reduces punishment or erases it outright. Indulgences emerged in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when the idea of purgatory took hold. Initially they were promised to combatants to encourage their participation in crusades t ..read more

This is a crosspost from the Basel Institute on Governance, written by GI-ACE researcher Claudia Baez Camargo on her project on harnessing informality.   Bila watu hufiki popote. “Without people or connections you won’t reach anywhere,” said a Tanzanian businessman participating in our recently completed research project on informal networks and corruption. His words encapsulate something we see time and again in our research on corruption: that bribery is far more than just a brute monetary transaction. Often more important, and far less studied, are the informal social networks tha ..read more

Professor Robert Barrington has offered some reflections prompted by the recent exchange between Matthew Stephenson and Bo Rothstein, seeking to contest the ‘narrative of anticorruption failure’. He appears to attribute this negative narrative wholly to the downbeat assessments of academics, whose demoralising overstatement of the case for failure is contrasted with the more positive assessments of practitioners. Although Professor Barrington recognises the value of much scholarship on corruption, he also observes that ‘with academic privilege comes responsibility – a responsibility to be care ..read more

Why are the super wealthy – including those who have made their money under global kleptocracies – so keen to donate to academia?   For some, the motivations may be purely altruistic and the outcomes of no personal benefit. But for the politically exposed, the picture is more complex. In our report Paying for a World Class Affiliation: Reputation Laundering in the University Sector of Open Societies, written with our colleagues Alexander Cooley and Tom Mayne, and published by the National Endowment for Democracy on 25 May 2021, we argue that increasing reliance on donations from th ..read more

It has been more than 20 years since Allen Schick (1998) warned in the World Bank Research Observer that New Public Management reforms are not suitable for the re-organisation of the public sector in developing countries. Decentralisation, performance related pay and the introduction of managerial discretion to ‘let managers manage’ were popular in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries at the time. International aid organisations and consultants promoted these managerial reforms in developing countries assuming that what worked for OECD countries must also w ..read more

If there is one overarching theme of the preliminary conclusions of our research, it is that laws and regulations are meaningless if they are not enforced. This holds true across the various strands of our project, which focuses on money laundering in the banking and real estate sectors, and also tackles issues such as philanthropic donations and ‘reputation laundering’.   At a recent GI-ACE event*, Jason Sharman presented some initial findings from his banking study with colleagues Dan Findley and Mike Nielsen. This entailed the sending out of over 40,000 emails to banks across th ..read more

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Manipulated regulatory procedures, beset by undue political influence and connections to private interests, resulting in huge private financial gains for a few well-positioned insiders. These are among the challenges facing South Africa’s urban development processes. Three former high ranking South African municipal officials met to delve into their experiences with corruption and integrity at a September virtual roundtable panel hosted by the African Centre for Cities as part of the 2020 Southern Africa City Studies Conference (SACSC). Their message: urban planners and other urban professi ..read more