Resources: corruption

140 NGOs from 37 countries called upon Prime Minister Tony Blair to re-open the investigation of the Al Yamamah defence contract between BAE and Saudi Arabia government because of the impacts of corruption on democracy, sustainable development, human rights and poverty.

Corner House Research and Campaign Against Arms Trade agreed to the Treasury Solicitor's request for an extension of time to respond to the 18 December 2006 letter sent on behalf of The Corner House and CAAT, provided that he confirmed that the groups would receive a response by 19 January 2007.

On 18 December 2006, The Corner House and Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) began a legal challenge to the decision by the UK's Serious Fraud Office to drop the investigation into bribery allegations involving BAE Systems Plc in Saudi Arabia.

The OECD Working Group on Bribery's reviews of how countries are implementing the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention are an invaluable source of information about practice in different countries in combating bribery. This paper pulls together all the Group's comments and recommendations about public procurement, and summarises the procedures countries have developed to exclude companies convicted of bribery from public procurement.

There need to be considerable improvements to the UK's enforcement regime to combat corruption and money laundering. Laws on non tax-deductibility of bribes are not being adequately enforced. The UK government should take further measures to raise awareness of bribery; introduce preventative measures and new corruption legislation; and establish a fair and workable debarment system.

On 21 October 2005, the ECGD announced several proposed changes to its anti-corruption procedures. This document outlines The Corner House's concerns about these proposals, particularly the weak audit clause and the non-requirement to supply the identity of agents.

This book, from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, outlines some of the practical threats to public well-being and climatic stability that arise from the growing fashion for carbon trading. It focuses on the disturbing record of South African "carbon-saving" projects and their role in shoring up a destructive oil economy.

This paper documents new subsidies that ECAs may give for large dams; evaluates the accompanying standards that ECAs may require for dam projects; and identifies future ECA actions if funding for dams is not to have negative environmental and social impacts.

This submission to the OECD Working Group on Export Credits and Credit Guarantees argues that a strong new OECD Action Statement on Combating Bribery in Officially Supported Export Credits should be agreed in October 2005 and recomends key anti-bribery measures to be incorporated into it.

This document outlines ways in which the UK Government can implement a new EU Procurement Directive requiring Member States to exclude companies and individuals convicted of corruption from being awarded public procurement contracts.

This submission to the EU Council Working Group on Trade details how the OECD Action Statement on Combating Bribery in Officially Supported Export Credits should be strengthened and how European Export Credit Agencies should improve their anti-bribery procedures. It was prepared for a special meeting held between the EU Council Working Group on Export Credits and NGOs on 22 June 2005.

This Legal Opinion examines the legal powers of the UK's export credit agency, the Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD), to blacklist companies involved in bribery and corruption. It argues that ECGD would be perfectly entitled to have a firm policy of refusing to provide financial support to companies that have previously engaged in bribery or corruption, provided that it also considered the exceptional circumstances of any particular case on its merits.

In March 2005, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published an extensive review of how the UK is implementing the OECD's Anti-Bribery Convention. This document analyses the review's main findings.

In December 2004, The Corner House began legal proceedings against the Export Credits Guarantee Department, claiming it had weakened its anti-corruption rules after consulting corporations only. It was awarded the first-ever full "protective costs order" to challenge the changed rules: The Corner House would not have to pay the Department's legal costs, even if it lost, because the challenge was in the public interest.

International carbon trading systems are failing. They are both climatically ineffective and politically infeasible. The UK Parliament's Environment Audit Committee conducted an Inquiry into the International Challenge of Climate Change: UK Leadership in the G8 and EU in October-December 2004. This Memorandum was submitted as written evidence to the Inquiry by The Corner House, SinksWatch and Carbon Trade Watch.

Enforcement of overseas corruption offences involving British companies and individuals under the UK's anti-corruption legislation is crucial to tackling corruption internationally. The current arrangements in the UK between various law enforcement agencies are not the most effective means of ensuring that these offences are investigated and prosecuted. A more pro-active enforcement regime could detect overseas corruption offences as and when they occur and could act on credible suspicions of bribery.

Corruption in Thailand has been neither pervasive nor incompatible with economic growth. It is centred on a big business-politics complex whose rise has gone hand-in-hand with globalisation.

Institutional practices within the taxpayer-funded UK Export Credits Guarantee Department have exacerbated bribery and corruption by Western companies.

In July 2000, 19 corporations and individuals were being prosecuted in the Lesotho courts for bribing a top official in the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (a scheme intended to divert water from Lesotho to South Africa). This presentation explores the daily institutional practices that actively encourage the flouting of guidelines and anti-corruption regulations. It sheds light on the institutionalised racism that assumes the Third World to be inherently corrupt and corruptible, a view that underwrites bribery.

Summary of an NGO seminar held in the UK parliament to discuss Export Credit Agency reform.

The UK government's Export Credits Guarantees Department (ECGD) supports British exporters. Using public money to support private businesses is only justified if it has a demonstrable public purpose.

The Kyoto Protocol is not a step forward in the struggle to stabilise climate, but a stumble sideways into spurious science and the privatization of the atmosphere, contends this talk given at the "Resistance is Fertile" gathering in The Hague, The Netherlands

Multilateral agencies have been promoting the commoditization of land in the Mekong region. How is this project being advanced and resisted?

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is revising its General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) so as to increase international trade in services. If current proposals are implemented, GATS could be used to overturn almost any legislation governing services. Particularly under threat are public services -- health care, education, energy, water and sanitation. This briefing explores the potential for private companies to capture the most profitable components of publicly-provided and -funded health care services, leaving a reduced public sector to cope with the elderly, chronically sick and the poor who most need health care and who can least afford it.

The companies that want to build the controversial Ilisu Dam on the River Tigris in the Kurdish region of Southeast Turkey have sought financial backing from the export credit agencies (ECAs) of their countries. In January 1999, the ECAs attached four conditions to be met before they would issue export credits. During 9-16 October 2000, an international Fact Finding Mission of Non-Governmental Organisations from the UK, USA, Germany and Italy went to the region of the proposed dam to assess the Turkish government's progress meeting the four conditions.

“Moral dilemmas” are not unattached to political, bureaucratic, social and economic interests. They are deeply political and are products of everyday conflicts over meaning, resources and ways of living and power. Who raises a particular moral dilemma and why is thus of critical importance.

European dam builders, suppliers and consultants continue to promote and export their technologies to the countries of the South. In doing so, they tend to ignore, misrepresent or downplay many of the negative environmental, social and economic impacts of large dams that have discredited the dam building industry in Europe. This report presents the track record of the major European companies involved in large dams, detailed by company and by dams in Turkey, Lesotho, Paraguay/Argentina/Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, India, Malaysia and China.

Projects backed by export credit agencies (ECAs) are frequently environmentally destructive, socially oppressive or financially unviable. It is the poorest people in the countries where the projects are located who end up paying the bill. With rare exceptions, the major ECAs lack mandatory environmental and development standards, and are secretive and unaccountable.

Many internal wars in Africa, Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, far from representing societal breakdown, can be seen as a rational response on the part of rulers (and would-be rulers) to ensure their economic and political survival in a context of globalisation and the changing nation-state.

Au sein du mouvement écologiste occidental une aile conservatrice importante a développé, dans un souci de stabilité sociale, des conceptions sur la "culture" qui placent la cause profonde des "conflits ethniques" dans des antagonismes anciens, définitifs, implacables et invétérés entre populations. Ces conceptions sont très proches de celles de la Nouvelle Droite qui, de plus en plus, s'approprie le langage de la "différence" culturelle pour promouvoir un "racisme différencialiste". Il est important que les groupes progressistes s’opposent à cette manupulation politique d'éthnicité des environnementalistes conservateurs, ou de la Nouvelle Droite.

Popular opposition and changing macro-economic policies have disproved the claim that large-scale hydrolectric dams provide a cheap, reliable and economic source of power.

The practical outcome of free-market policies has not been to diminish the state’s power -- but to redirect it in favour of transnational interests. Thus the power of many Northern states to intervene in the economic and social affairs of other countries has increased. Resistance to the “free market state” is growing, as is the demand that the state’s powers be used to protect the interests and rights of citizens, not corporations.

Swedish-Swiss engineering company Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) has supplied generators for hydroelectric dams around the world, accounting for one-fifth of the world’s hydropower capacity. This analysis provides financial reasons why ABB should not continue to be involved in the hydropower sector. It forecasts a shrinking market because of substantial and growing opposition to large dams and insufficient private and public finance to build them. Its findings were circulated to ABB shareholders and financial journalists. In March 2000, ABB decided to sell its hydropower division, mentioning shareholders’ sensitivity to the significant environmental, human rights and social impacts of large-scale dams.

The rich have never been shy about praising the qualities that created their wealth. Nor are they short of convenient explanations for the poverty of others -- from “the breeding habits of the poor” to “economic mismanagement” and “protectionism”. But they have always found it difficult to explain poverty in ways that do not implicate themselves, contends this contribution to an Oxford Union debate, held at Oxford University, UK.

Different actors -- transnational corporations, political and technocratic elites, their opponents and others -- contend with and influence what is loosely called “globalization” in different ways. Constructive and engaged understanding of the power struggles between them all and their resources, motivations, dynamics, strategies, effectiveness, and capacities for alliances requires coming to grips with the ways in which they interpret and present their own struggles.

The commons is neither private nor public: neither business firm nor state utility, neither jealously guarded private plot nor national or city park. Industrial development has been possible only through dismantling the commons and harnessing the fragments to build up new economic and social patterns responsive to the interests of a dominant minority from which the great mass of humanity (particularly women) are excluded. Such enclosure has never gone unchallenged, however: resistance takes place in countless everyday ways in both the South and the North.

This opinion piece shows how environmental activists, ecological economists, development experts and deep green theorists tell self-serving and one-sided stories about Noble Savages, Eastern religions, “traditional communities” and ordinary householders. This "Green Orientalism" both arises from and perpetuates power imbalances. It must be constantly challenged by stories told from other points of view.

Effective political struggle in intercultural space means creatively weaving in and out of all the cultures present.