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EMBARGO: 25 March 2004; 12:00 GMT

Highlights from the Transparency International Global Corruption Report 2004

Political corruption:

No country in the world is immune from corruption in politics. The problem includes a wide range of acts committed by political leaders before, during and after leaving office. It includes acts that are proscribed by national and international law as well as activities that are not illegal, but do have a corrupting influence on the political process, such as when private sector companies lobby for policy favours.

The scale of the problem can be vast, as TI’s table of funds allegedly embezzled by some of the most notorious leaders of the last 20 years illustrates:

Political finance:

Many of the political corruption scandals of recent years revolve around the corrupt funding of political parties and candidates. Tools are available to governments to tackle the problem, by making the receipt of illicit donations a high-risk strategy. But most governments have failed to put robust safeguards into place.

Standard regulations include public financing of parties, limits on contributions and disclosure of sources. But even disclosure requirements – the least controversial of regulations – are lacking in one out of four countries ranked as free or partly free by Freedom House (see table below). One in three of these countries still has no system in place to regulate political party finance.

In addition to direct funding, legislation must take account of in-kind donations to parties, particularly free or subsidised media access. In Guatemala and Uruguay, media owners have gained significant political leverage by offering free air time to governing parties, while in Italy Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is both the largest private broadcaster and the regulator of three state-owned networks.

Laws regulating political finance must be followed up with effective enforcement. This means that independent oversight agencies must be endowed with powers to supervise, investigate and, if required, institute legal proceedings in cases of electoral malpractice. Unfortunately, many governments lack the political will to give teeth to electoral supervisory agencies lest it work to their disadvantage once out of office.

The UN Convention against Corruption

         The UN Convention against Corruption, adopted in Mexico in December 2003, is the first global instrument embracing a comprehensive range of anti-corruption measures to be taken at the national level. It will also enhance international cooperation on corruption prevention and enforcement. It must be ratified by 30 member states before it enters into force: the latest estimate is that this will occur at the end of 2005 at the earliest.

         The Convention breaks new ground, particularly in relation to the provisions on cross-border recovery of assets, but more is needed if it is to have a significant impact on reducing corruption.

The potential contribution the Convention could make in the fight against corruption was weakened by the United States’ refusal to countenance any mandatory provision on transparency in political funding. This has led to a lukewarm and optional provision tucked away in an article entitled ‘Public sector’.

Conversely, the Convention represents a welcome breakthrough regarding international cooperation on the return of assets.

Regional highlights

Africa

         The most significant development to affect the African region was the adoption in July 2003 of the African Union Convention against Corruption. The Convention awaits 15 ratifications before entering into force. It promises to strengthen laws on corruption by listing offences that should be punishable by domestic legislation and outlines measures to enable the detection and investigation of corruption offences. The Convention also determines the jurisdiction of state parties; organises mutual assistance in relation to corruption and related officers; encourages the education and promotion of public awareness on the evils of corruption; and establishes a framework for the monitoring and supervision of enforcement of the Convention. A weakness is that the Convention’s procedure permits any signatory to opt out of some or all provisions.

In South Africa, after nearly 10 years of democracy, the secrecy surrounding the private funding of political parties has still not been pierced because there remains a glaring lacuna in South African law. There is no law regulating private funding to political parties. This lack of control allows the wealthy to ‘buy’ influence and access through secret donations. A chance to amend this situation was missed when the issue of political donations was left out of the 2002 Prevention of Corruption Bill.

A positive development was seen in Uganda with the adoption of the Leadership Code 2002, which requires elected politicians and senior public officials to declare income and assets or face a penalty, and provides for their declarations to be made public. Contrasting with this development is the Political Parties and Organisations Act 2002, which bars political parties from campaigning for office, limits their freedom to hold public meetings and stops them operating outside the capital. The law's constitutionality is still being challenged.

In Zambia, the president’s refusal in March 2003 to give his assent to the Political Parties Fund Bill, which would have funded political parties in proportion to their number of members of parliament, was a missed opportunity to improve equity and transparency of the political process.

During the 32 years in which Mobutu Sese Seko ruled the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) the country received more than US $12 billion in aid, mainly from the World Bank. Much of that money vanished, but Mobuto himself claimed to be worth less than US $ 50 million. The government that succeeded him in 1997 failed to respond to a request by Swiss authorities to clarify ownership of the missing funds, many of which were thought to have been secretly channelled into Swiss banks, and to this day the money has not been repatriated.

In contrast the Nigerian government has the political will to deal with the legacy of past corruption. Estimates of the amount General Sani Abacha looted during his five-year dictatorship vary from US$ 2 billion to US $ 5 billion. The upper limit represents about 10 per cent of Nigeria’s annual income from oil over five years. Abacha was replaced by another military ruler, General Abdulsalami Abubaker, who returned Nigeria to democratic rule and recovered some US $ 825 million. But a further US $ 1.3 billion remains frozen in Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, and the current administration of Olusegun Obasanjo is still trying to repatriate the money.

Asia/Pacific

Vote buying is a major problem in East Asia. In the Philippines an estimated 3 million people were offered some form of payment in the 2002 barangay (community-level) elections. In Thailand, 30 per cent of household heads surveyed in a national sample said they were offered money during the 1996 general election. In Taiwan’s third-largest city, Taichung, and the surrounding area, 27 per cent of a random sample of eligible voters reported in 1999 that they had accepted cash during previous election campaigns. The Nakhon Ratchisma Rajabat Institute, which monitors poll fraud in Thailand, estimates that candidates gave a total of US $460 million to voters in the 2001 legislative elections.

         Japan has been accused for years of buying votes in the International Whaling Commission using overseas development assistance to recruit developing country members in support of its whaling interests. The number of developing countries joining the IWC and systematically backing Japan’s position has increased to 16, including six eastern Caribbean islands, bringing Japan close to having the simple majority it needs in order to revise the IWC’s rules of procedures. This could allow it to introduce secret ballot voting on any issue.

         Bid rigging in public procurement is pervasive in Japan, especially in the construction sector. It was already criminalised under the penal code and regulated under the fair trade law, but the Act Concerning Elimination and Prevention of Involvement in Bid Rigging goes a step further. It came into effect in January 2003 and empowers the Fair Trade Commission to require the head of a ministry or local government to conduct investigations and punish – and demand compensation from – individuals involved in bid rigging.

         In China, preparations for the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing and Expo 2010 in Shanghai – as well as major development programmes such as ‘Developing Western China’ – have focused attention on the widespread corruption in public procurement, in particular in the construction sector, and have motivated a series of reform measures. Most significant is the Government Procurement Act, which came into force in January 2003. The challenges are enormous: the volume of government expenditure in public procurement jumped from 3.1 billion yuan (US $ 0.4 billion) in 1998 to 150 billion yuan (US $ 18.7 billion) in 2003.

Europe

            Corruption flourishes in the majority of the Central and Eastern European states that are hoping to join the EU. Pressure from the European Commission on the 10 countries joining in 2004 has had a major impact on areas such as the ratification of the main international anti-corruption conventions. But the legislative process has tended to be slapdash and mechanisms to enforce new laws are lacking in many areas. The result is that problems are worse than the Commission acknowledges, especially in the areas of procurement, political party financing, patronage networks and conflicts of interest.

The situation is unlikely to improve once countries join the EU, since the EU itself lacks a coherent anti-corruption framework. Once countries are members, the Commission will no longer be able to apply the double standards that have required anti-corruption policies of new members that were never required of older members.

In many European countries the public can access information about donations to political parties. But in Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Finland, Spain and Turkey the level of public disclosure is low, or ‘hidden’, meaning that donations are reported but the figures are lumped together in such a way that it is impossible to work out who gave what to whom and for what purpose. In Albania and Croatia there is no public disclosure whatsoever.

While there is a need for greater disclosure in many countries, recent elections in Ukraine serve to warn of the risk that disclosure of financial support to the political opposition may expose donors to harassment in countries where enforcement institutions are not independent. A number of the supporters of opposition candidate Oleksander Moroz, including publishing houses Migrodinaka and Topografil, were allegedly subjected to harassment by the various states inspectorates after the 1999 presidential and 2002 parliamentary elections, and many were forced into bankruptcy.

Legislative developments elsewhere show how the political finance framework can be abused to serve the interests of governing parties. Azerbaijan adopted by referendum in August 2002 a constitutional amendment that allows ordinary courts to close down political parties; formerly, only higher level courts could ban parties. A second amendment increases the term for official confirmation of election results from seven to 14 post-election days, which gives incumbents a better opportunity to falsify results. Kazakhstan’s July 2002 law on political parties controls donations, but crucially also increases the number of members required to set up a party from 3,000 to 50,000 people. As a result of the new law the number of parties in existence was reduced from 19 to seven, of which only one was an opposition party.

            A worrying trend in Europe over the period covered by the GCR 2004 is toward the extension of immunity privileges for political leaders. Azerbaijan, France, Greece, Italy and the Kyrgyz Republic all proposed or approved legislation that could shield high-political officeholders from prosecution for corruption.

European companies – and governments – have been central players in political corruption scandals worldwide, especially involving the arms and the oil industries. The Elf trials show how political influence is used by Western governments in oil-rich developing countries to sign favourable contracts generating super-normal profits. The arms dimension of the Elf case illustrates how politicians involved in the arms trade abuse a secrecy they justify on the grounds of national defence.

Latin America

         Seven of the 10 countries with consistently high measures of political corruption according to the World Economic Forum’s 2003 Executive Opinion Survey of 102 countries are Latin American: Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Panama and Paraguay.

         Nevertheless, there were several positive political-finance related developments in Latin America in 2002–3. In Brazil, legislation was approved in February 2002 requiring candidates to present their campaign donation and expenditure statements electronically, and in Costa Rica the constitutional court ruled in May 2003 that bank secrecy privileges do not apply to political party assets.

In Argentina, congress passed a law on party financing in June 2002 that sets limits on donations and provides high disclosure requirements as well as sanctions for breaking funding regulations. This makes Argentina the country with the most complete party-funding regime in the region. But even in Argentina there is a big gap between the law and its implementation: the law was applied for the first time in the April 2003 presidential election, when the 18 candidates disclosed the origin of only 20 per cent of funds from private sources, according to a survey by Poder Ciudadano.

At the opposite end of the spectrum of party funding regulations is Peru, which is an example of continuing negligence. The electoral court’s attempt to introduce more reporting requirements in 2002 was rejected by legislators, who responded by drafting a law that actually withdrew any obligation for parties and candidates to report on their fundraising activities.

Latin America is currently serving as a litmus test for the effectiveness of national and international criminal law systems in prosecuting corrupt politicians. Two former heads of state, Alberto Fujimori of Peru and Arnoldo Alemán of Nicaragua, face criminal charges for corruption. Japan continues to reject the requests of the Peruvian courts to extradite Fujimori, while in Nicaragua Alemán’s fate is still in question, after his party submitted an amnesty request to congress, which would quash the 20-year prison sentence he is  serving under house arrest.

         In Brazil, President Lula da Silva came to power with a promise to combat corruption – made manifest in a signed pledge prepared by Transparência Brasil. A year later few concrete steps had been taken to fulfil the pledge and the baseline requirement that an anti-corruption agency be established has yet to be met.

Middle East

On 21 May 2003, an earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale hit northeastern Algeria with an epicentre close to the coastal town of Boumerdès, leaving 2,300 dead, 10,000 injured and more than 100,000 homeless. Though long recognised as a seismic zone, the region was the site of hundreds of buildings – old and new – that simply folded in on themselves, indicating that no anti-earthquake measures were incorporated in their construction. A few days later an earthquake of even greater intensity struck Japan, causing only slight injuries to the inhabitants. Algerians attributed the terrible death toll in Boumerdès to corruption in housing construction and the lack of effective state inspection.

The Egyptian government pursued several high-profile corruption cases in 2002–03 with prosecutorial zeal, partly to woo foreign investors and partly to show the public that it is serious about purging the bad apples from its ranks. But a closer look shows political considerations superseding genuine efforts at institutional reform. The nature of the campaign and its near-exclusive focus on senior officials in President Mubarak’s NDP, concurrent with the political rise of his son Gamal, has led to speculation that the crackdown is simply a prelude to his son’s increasingly public role.

         In the Palestinian Authority (PA), efforts to clean up institutions weakened by corruption were hampered by the ongoing occupation. The occupation impeded legislative elections which had been scheduled for early 2003 and also provided a pretext for recalcitrant members of the PA to resist reform efforts. Some improvements were made in terms of transparency at the finance ministry, most significantly with the decision to create the Palestine Investment Fund to manage commercial assets.

North America

         Canada’s rules on lobbying are often cited as a model for the rest of the world, but even though they were reformed in June 2002 following a series of scandals involving political donations and the misuse of public funds, they are plagued with loopholes. Rules on disclosure remain too limited and weak enforcement is a problem.

         A positive development during the period in question was the amendment of the Canada Elections Act in June 2003, introducing strict limits on political donations. To compensate for the loss of private financing, parties will receive state financing in proportion to the number of votes received.

         The government is facing the fallout of a scandal involving three public sector agencies, known as Crown corporations, which channeled taxpayers’ money to government-friendly advertising agencies in the province of Quebec. The heads of the three agencies have been suspended, but this action may not be enough to convince the electorate that the ruling Liberal party is serious about curbing corruption.

In the United States, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), otherwise known as the McCain-Feingold-Cochrane bill, was passed in March 2002. Proponents consider it to be a major step towards reducing corruption in American politics by putting an end to ‘soft money’ and restricting candidate-specific ‘issue’ advertising. The legislation has shortcomings, however, and has already been subject to legal challenges and efforts to circumvent it.

The results of the World Economic Forum’s 2003 Executive Opinion Survey lend weight to the perception that although they are not breaking laws, US businesses exert unfair influence over the political process. While irregular payments and illegal donations are perceived to be less common in the United States than in the average of the 102 countries polled, legal donations are perceived to have a noticeably greater impact on policy outcomes.

The Millennium Challenge Account – a new US foreign assistance programme aimed at providing substantial amounts of additional aid to a select group of countries that score highly against a series of indicators on ‘ruling justly’, ‘investing in people’ and ‘economic freedom’ – has the potential to fundamentally improve the effectiveness of US foreign assistance. But the make-or-break requirement that recipient countries score above the median on corruption as one of three ‘ruling justly’ indicators could debar deserving countries. The data on corruption is simply not accurate enough; nor is it up-to-date enough to reflect improvements made by new governments.

Please refer to the country reports section of the Global Corruption Report 2004 for detailed country-specific information on the following:

Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burundi, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Egypt, France, Greece, Guatemala, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Lebanon, Mali, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Palestinian Authority, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Russia, Senegal, Serbia, South Africa, Uganda, United States of America, Zambia.