Corruption by officials, in its most basic definition, involves dishonest or fraudulent acts conducted at a state level by those with political power.
Taking on many forms including bribery, money laundering, embezzlement or tax evasion, corruption is proving to be a fast-spreading cancer impacting the entire global economy to the tune of $3.6 trillion annually (according to a UN Secretary General statement).
This cancer has led to failing countries, unjustifiable poverty, and it threatens not only the global markets but also international security.
The United Nations has emphatically noted that corruption is one of the main impediments to achieving its 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, which include the elimination of poverty and hunger, as well as improved education.
However, the United Nations’ solution to “encourage” governments to spearhead anti-corruption campaigns ignores the elephant in the room, which is: how can you ask those who benefit from the status quo to act against their own interests? In an ideal world, governments are run by civil servants whose only drive is to serve the greater good, but any closer examination of the way political officials act indicates that they are the main source of the problem and the primary beneficiaries.
Reason therefore informs us that if corruption has a real-life impact on the ground, then a solution must have real-world applications. Otherwise, we are stuck trying to fix a tangible problem with platitudes and impassioned-but-empty promises from politicians.
The United Nations’ inability to impose laws on sovereign countries undermines its intentions. As an institution it has proven to be impotent in addressing massive atrocities and cannot therefore be relied on to untangle such a complex and delicate web.
There is an urgent need for a supra-national entity with real powers that can serve as our Council against Corruption.
Such a Council must be apolitical and imbued with the authority to hold those accountable for the status of “failing countries”.
The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) attempts to bail out these failing countries, by giving more money, only feeds this cycle of exploitation as the assistance goes directly to those who continue to exploit their states tragedies to fatten their offshore wallets. Soon, the IMF would begin to direct its funds to those more deserving countries and eschew the corrupt ones, which would exacerbate their problems.
So far, and in a convoluted way, the IMF is padding the pockets of corrupt officials.
The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) arbitrates between countries and individual investors. For instance, if an investor’s properties are expropriated by a certain country, the go-to organization would be ICSID and the NY Convention gives it the right to enforce the foreign arbitral awards. This is to protect investors, but what about protecting citizens who have suffered poverty, illness, and a lack of proper schooling?
The impact extends beyond borders. Counter-terrorism assistance finds its way to warlords, money directed at health-care is spent on militaries that keep dictators in power, while millions die from easily curable diseases, and the list continues. The money given by donor states is wasted and those meant to benefit are left worse off than before.
It is therefore imperative that the international community rallies around the creation of a Council against Corruption, whose sole purpose is to target corrupt officials by following the money trail and be granted access to offshore accounts, and companies.
No member could refuse its creation because of its esoteric and benevolent objective, with the caveat that powerful countries use their donations to weaken poorer countries to dictate their own interests and agendas. And those weak, corrupted countries would rather deal with, let’s say, Russia or China who would give them non-conditional free loans in return for serving Russia’s or China’s political agenda, than accept onerous terms from the IMF. How they would justify not signing up for the CC would be interesting to witness!
Such a Council needs to have supra- and extra-judicial powers that enable it to sequester and return funds to the affected countries, applying those funds, under its supervision, to needed projects. The purpose is simple: ensure funds go where they were intended. This Council need not concern itself with additional issues such as levying charges against corrupt officials.
Once due diligence is done and assets of suspects are attached as a precautionary measure, those accounts and properties would then need to be properly managed by yet another arm of CC. Suspects can, then, resort to ICJ for recompense.
The Council against Corruption, therefore, would have to have four arms; an investigative one to trace funds, an executive one, a tendering and supervisory one to execute the needed projects in the affected countries, and one to manage sequestered funds with a waiver.
Failing countries would be defined as ones that have increased their government debt without a commensurate improvement in living standards, in higher private-sector employment, in beneficial infrastructure, in affordable and better healthcare and education, in a growing GDP and GDP per Capita etc. Such criteria and additional ones would trigger investigation by the CC.
The main challenge is: who? Who can be trusted to take on such a task, and be responsible for ensuring that this Council remains apolitical and not a tool in the hands of the powers that be? The candidates should be chosen to be persons without reproach, persons such as Christine Lagarde, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Mario Draghi etc. We already know what needs to be done, and figuring out the answer cannot remain unanswered. As the popular adage goes, “time is money” and, currently, this money is being siphoned off to a Swiss bank, while a multi-trillion dollar cancer continues to grow.
Image credit: Keith Cooper