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The factual backdrop to this affair is well-known. FIFA, world football’s governing body has, for a number of years, been the subject of allegations of corruption. Then, after a series of dawn raids on 27 May 2015, seven FIFA officials, of various nationalities, the most famous being Jack Warner, the Trinidadian former vice president of FIFA, were arrested in a luxury hotel in Zurich where they were staying prior to the FIFA Congress.
In December 2013, Turkish authorities arrested the sons of several prominent cabinet ministers on bribery, embezzlement, and smuggling charges. Investigators claimed that the men were contributing members in a conspiracy to illicitly trade Turkish gold for Iranian oil gas (an act which, among other things, violates the spirit of United Nations’ sanctions targeting Tehran). The scheme purportedly netted a vast fortune in proceeds in the form of dividends and bribes. Among those suspected of benefiting from the trade was Prime Minister (now President) Tayyip Erdoğan and members of his family. The firestorm from this scandal was initially so furious many feared that Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party would not survive its implications. Yet as of this September, the investigation into this scandal has all but come to an end. The officials involved in propagating and executing the investigation have all been dismissed or transferred. Consequently, virtually all charges related to the case have been dropped.
Most of the analysis of this scandal has focused upon the political implications of the arrests and the subsequent purges of Turkey’s national police force. Events since December have indeed underscored the intense levels of strife within Turkey’s governing institutions as well as the growing authoritarian tendencies of the country’s ruling party. Yet Turkey’s “oil for gold” corruption scandal also illuminates fundamental, yet long-standing, aspects of the relationship between prominent illicit trades and the country’s politics.
Turkey’s black market, by all accounts, is exceeding large and highly lucrative. As a country sitting at a major intersection in global commerce, Turkey acts as a spring, valve and spigot for multiple illicit industries. Weapons, narcotics and undocumented migrants, as well as contraband carpets, petroleum, cigarettes, and precious metals all pass in and through the country’s borders on a regular basis. Official statistics on cigarette smuggling offer a few hints of the extent of smuggling in and out of Turkey. According to Interior Ministry sources, Turkish seizures of smuggled cigarettes grew fourteen fold between 2009 and 2012 (with ten million cigarettes seized in 2009 and over 145 million in 2012). In January of this year, Bulgarian customs officials purportedly confiscated fourteen million cigarettes illegally imported from Turkey in one seizure alone. The numbers of arrests for cigarette smuggling has also climbed precipitously, with over 4000 people arrested in 2009 and over 24000 arrests in 2012.
Ankara Views taken by Peretz Partensky. CC BY-SA 2.0 by Flickr
Organized crime takes other forms in Turkey. Criminal networks, builders, and lawmakers have been known to violate laws governing land sales, usage, building safety, and contracting. Bribes and kickbacks to government officials and regulators historically have been essential elements in the rapid building projects undertaken throughout the country for much of the last century. Charges levied against the managers of Istanbul’s Fenerbahce soccer club stand as an example of the match fixing and extortion scandals that have rocked professional sports in Turkey in recent years. Gangsters and extortionists, known as kabadayı, have been counted among Turkey’s most noted and notorious figures in the public spotlight. All in all, organized criminal trades have generated an untold number of fortunes for a select few and have provided a subsistence living for an even larger number of average citizens for a very long time in Turkey.
If Tayyip Erdoğan and his family did glean a great fortune as a result of illicit doings (which some reports claim to amount to total in the tens of millions of dollars), Turkey’s president joins a fairly sizable host of Turkish politicians who have benefited from organized criminal trades. American officials in the 1950s, for example, secretly suspected that noted members of Adnan Menderes’ Democratic Party had protected major Turkish heroin traffickers. During the 1970s, at least four members of the Turkish Grand National Assembly were official charged with attempting to transport heroin abroad. Other politicians from this era, including one-time Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, were unofficially suspected of engaging in the drug trade but never charged. Accusations of theft and corruption especially dogged the governments of the tumultuous 1990s. Tansu Ciller, the country’s first female prime minister, was implicated in organized criminal activity both before and after she was first elected to office. Tayyip Erdoğan’s JDP came to power in 2002 with the promise of bringing discipline and respectability to politics. Yet even as recent as last year, a regional JDP chairman was implicated in trading in heroin in the province of Van. The revelations of December 2013 now has many in Turkey convinced that the JDP is as dirty and corruptible as any of the parties that had preceded it.
Erdoğan’s ability to deflect last year’s corruption charges has not put the specter of smuggling and corruption to rest. Local media reports and other studies suggest that the Syrian civil war has stimulated a surge in smuggling along Turkey’s southern border. It is now estimated that fuel, cigarette, and cell phone smuggling has risen by 314%, 135%, and 563% respectively since the war began. The initial efforts to arm and maintain resistance groups in Syria were deeply indebted to Turkey’s smuggling trade. As smuggling continues, it is clear that some groups have attempted to tax trade into and out of Syria (al-Nusrah, for example, purportedly levies a fee of 500 Syrian lira for every barrel of fuel that crosses the border). What this means for the present and future of Turkey’s government is not entirely clear. Suggestions that Ankara has allowed for the passage of large numbers of foreign fighters into Syria has cast doubt over the country’s police and customs officials stationed on its borders (particularly after the official purges earlier this year). Trading schemes and corruption allegations like those revealed in December may yet again manifest themselves considering what international watchdogs call Turkey’s “grey” status as a state with loose embezzlement and money laundering controls. Whether these trends will dent the image of Tayyip Erdoğan or upend JDP control over Turkey remains to be seen.
Headline Image: Turkish flag photo by Abigail Powell. CC BY-NC 2.0 by Flickr
When Benigno Aquino III was elected Philippine President in 2010, combating entrenched corruption was uppermost on his projected reform agenda. Hitherto, it has been unclear what the full extent and nature of reform ambitions of his administration might be. The issue has now been forced by ramifications from whistleblowers’ exposure of an alleged US$224 scam involving discretionary funds by Congress representatives. Fallout has already put some prominent Senators in the hot seat, but will deeper and more systemic reforms follow?
A crucial but often overlooked factor shaping prospects for reform in the Philippines, and elsewhere, is contestation over the meaning and purposes of accountability. Accountability means different things to different people. Even authoritarian rulers increasingly lay claim to it. Therefore, whether it is liberal, moral or democratic ideology that exerts greatest reform influence matters greatly.
Liberal accountability champions legal, constitutional, and contractual institutions to restrain the ability of state agencies to violate the political authority of the individual. Moral accountability ideologues emphasize how official practices must be guided by a moral code, invoking religious, monarchical ethnic, nationalist, and other externally constituted political authority. Democratic accountability ideologies are premised on the notion that official action at all levels should be subject to sanction, either directly or indirectly, in a manner promoting popular sovereignty.
Anti-corruption movements usually involve coalitions incorporating all three ideologies. However, governments tend to be least responsive to democratic ideologies because their reforms are directed at fundamental power relations. The evolving controversy in the Philippines is likely to again bear this out.
What whistleblowers exposed in July 2013 was an alleged scam masterminded by business figure Janet Lim Napoles. Money was siphoned from the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), or ‘pork barrel’ as it is popularly known, providing members of Congress with substantial discretionary project funding.
This funding has been integral to political patronage and corruption in the Philippines, precisely why ruling elites have hitherto resolutely defended PDAF despite many scandals and controversies linked to it.
However, public reaction to this scam was on a massive scale. Social and mass media probing and campaigning combined with the ‘Million People March’ in Manila’s Rizal Park involving a series of protests starting in August 2013. After initially defending PDAF despite his anti-corruption platform, Aquino announced PDAF’s abolition. Subsequently, the Supreme Court reversed three earlier rulings to unanimously declare the PDAF unconstitutional for violating the separation of powers principle.
Then, on 1 April 2014, the Office of the Ombudsman (OMB) announced it found probable cause to indict three opposition senators – including the powerful Juan Ponce Enrile, who served as Justice Secretary and Defense Minister under Marcos and Senate President from 2008 until June 2013 – for plunder and multiple counts of graft for kickbacks or commissions channeled through bogus non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
These are the Philippines’ first senatorial indictments for plunder, conviction for which can lead to life imprisonment. Napoles and various state officials and employees of NGOs face similar charges. Aquino’s rhetoric about instituting clean and accountable governance is translating into action. But which ideologies are exerting greatest influence and what are the implications?
Moral ideology influences were evident under Aquino even before the abolition of PDAF through new appointments to enhance the integrity of key institutions. Conchita Morales, selected by the President in mid-2011 as the new Ombudsman, was strongly endorsed by Catholic Church leaders. Aquino also appointed Heidi Mendoza as a commissioner to the Commission of Audit. Mendoza played a vital whistleblower role leading to the resignation of the previous Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez and was depicted by the Church as a moral role model for Christians.
However, there have been many episodes in the past where authorities have selectively pruned ‘bad apples,’ but with a focus on those from competing political or economic orchards. Will Aquino this time go beyond appeals to moral ideology and intra-elite combat to progress liberal institutional reform?
The accused senators ask why they have been singled out from 40 named criminally liable following the whistleblowers’ claims, inferring political persecution. Yet if continuing investigations lead to charges against people closer to the administration it would indicate not. In a clear alignment with liberal ideology, Communications Secretary Herminio Coloma recently raised expectations of such a change: ‘We are a government of laws, not of men. Let rule of law take its course.’
The jury is still out too on just how substantive the institutional change to the PDAF will prove. The President’s own pork barrel lump sum appropriations in the national budget are unaltered, despite public calls for it too to go. Indeed, some argue the President is now even more powerful a pork dispenser through de facto PDAF concentration in his hands.
PDAF’s abolition is also in a transitional phase with the 2014 budget taking account of existing PDAF commitments. The P25-billion PDAF was directed to the major public funding implementing agencies incorporating these commitments on a line item basis. There is a risk, though, that a precedent has been set for legislators’ pet projects to be negotiated with departmental heads in private rather than scrutinized in the legislature.
Certainly the coalition for change is building. Alongside popular forces, internationally competitive globalized elements of the Philippines bourgeoisie are a growing support base for liberal accountability ideology. Yet longstanding inaction on corruption reflects entrenched power structures inside and outside Congress antithetical to the routine and institutionalized promotion of liberal and, especially, democratic accountability.
Thus, while the instigation of official action on the pork barrel scam following the whistleblowers’ actions is testimony to the power of public mobilizations and campaigns, there are serious obstacles to more effective accountability institutionalization promoting popular sovereignty.
Acute concentrations of wealth and social power in the Philippines not only affect relationships between public officials and some elites, they also fundamentally constrain political competition. Oligarchs enjoy massive electoral resource advantages including the capacity for vote buying and other questionable campaign strategies. Outright intimidation, including extrajudicial killings of some of the most concerted opponents of elite rule and vested interests, remains widespread.
Therefore, parallel with popular anti-pork demands is yet another push for Congress to pass enabling law to finally give effect to the provision in the 1987 Constitution to ban political dynasties. The proliferation of political dynasties and corruption has been mutually reinforcing. Congressional dominance by wealthy elites and political clans shapes the laws overseen by officials, the appointment of those officials and, in turn, the culture and practices of public institutions.
When Congress resumes sessions in May, it will have before it the first Anti-Dynasty Bill to have passed the committee level. Public mood has made it more difficult for the rich and powerful in Congress to be as dismissive as previously of such reform attempts. The prospects of the current Bill passing are nevertheless dim but the struggle for democratic accountability will continue.
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Image credit: Dollars in envelope. By OlgaLIS, via iStockphoto.
The new UK Bribery Act 2010 (“the Bribery Act”) came into force on 1 July 2011, and, according to the guidance issued by the UK Government (“the Government Guidance”; see The Bribery Act 2010: Guidance), is intended to contribute to wider international efforts to combat bribery.
While targeting all forms of bribery, the Bribery Act has significant implications for commercial organisations. In addition to the general offences of bribing another (section 1) and being bribed (section 2) (both of which may be committed by a company), the Bribery Act created two offences which target commercial bribery: under section 6, it is an offence to bribe a foreign public official with the intention of obtaining or retaining business or a business advantage; and section 7 makes it an offence for a “relevant commercial organisation” to fail to prevent an “associated person” from bribing another with the intention of obtaining or retaining business or a business advantage for the organisation.
Importantly, the Bribery Act has extra-territorial effect. Liability is imposed irrespective of whether the act or omission which forms part of the offence took place in the UK or elsewhere. Furthermore, the provisions of section 7 are not limited to companies and partnerships which are incorporated or formed in the UK, but extend to foreign companies and partnerships which carry on a business, or any part of a business, in any part of the UK.
The consequences of conviction for an offence under the Bribery Act are severe, and may include the payment of unlimited fines, debarment from EU government contracts and (for individuals) imprisonment for up to 14 years.
In his introduction to the Government Guidance, the UK Secretary of State for Justice, Kenneth Clarke, states that the Bribery Act’s provisions are aimed at “making life difficult for the mavericks responsible for corruption, not unduly burdening the vast majority of decent, law-abiding firms.” Nevertheless, any organisation which considers that it may be a “relevant commercial organisation” for the purposes of the Bribery Act would be well-advised to introduce internal anti-bribery procedures. If nothing else, the existence within an organisation of adequate procedures designed to combat bribery may serve as a defence to liability under section 7, which is otherwise strict.
The Government Guidance is focussed, in large part, on advising organisations on appropriate anti-bribery procedures. It expounds six key principles which are not prescriptive, but which, it is suggested, should form the basis of any business’ anti-bribery policy.
A rigorous anti-bribery policy, devised in accordance with the Government Guidance, will be imperative for those participating in M&A transactions, which can present considerable risks from bribery. Such transactions generally result in a commercial organisation acquiring new associated persons whose conduct may expose the acquirer to liability under the Bribery Act. In addition, joint venture partners are likely to fall within the meaning of “associated persons”, and thus each participant in the venture could be prosecuted for an offence committed by its partner.
As part of such a policy, due diligence should be carried out throughout the M&A procedure, in which the risks of bribery are identified and addressed, and parties to transactions may wish to negotiate additional contractual protections in the form of warranties and indemnities to reduce their exposure to liability under the Bribery Act for the conduct of their associates.
Clearly the nature and extent of an organisation’s exposure to bribery-related offences will depend on the form and circumstances of the deal in question. By way of example, an organisation should be cautious in respect of transactions in a country in which there is a high level of co
0 Comments on The UK Bribery Act 2010 and its impact on Mergers & Aquisitions transactions as of 1/1/1900
I'm emerging briefly from the Cave of Revision (where I had a very nice epiphany yesterday, thank you, and now I'm pretty sure I know how to fix the part that wasn't working in this story) to check the calendar.
Note: there is a chance to win free books ahead, including a collectible first edition. Keep reading!
Gasp. We only have 61 days until the half-marathon in Lake Placid.
::reaches for running shoes:: ::slaps self and points to massive manuscript and mountain of notes::
Truth be told I ran yesterday, so today is a cross-training day (w00t). So far this year, I've done pretty good sticking to my goal of running 20 miles a week. As of yesterday, when I staggered up the driveway, I have run 303 miles since January 1st. The snow is finally gone up here on the tundra, so I've abandoned the treadmill in favor of hilly country roads well-stocked with rotting roadkill.
New readers of the blog might be wondering why on earth I'm doing all this running. My husband and I have vowed to raise $5,000 for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's Team in Training fund. The money goes for research into the causes of and treatments for blood cancers, which kills an American every ten minutes. My cousin is fighting this disease right now so it is a cause that means a great deal to our family.
Note: You're almost to the part where you get to win the free stuff! Keep reading!
Because I know a million, bazillion people, I was able to meet my fundraising goal last month. My studly, adorable, patient, quick-witted husband (yeah, that's him in the photo) is not far behind, but he could use a little help. He is 60% of the way to his goal. All he needs is another $1,000. But he needs it soon. (Photo by Sonya Sones, BTW.)
Here's where the bribery begins... I mean, here's the free stuff!!!!
I am dashing outside the Cave of Revision for a quick breath of fresh air. All is going fairly well. I am working long days, but love being so submerged in my story. One of the characters is now found only on the cutting room floor. Eliminating her cleared up all kinds of structural problems in the text.
Now if I could just get rid of the hamsters who have taken up residence in my lungs, life would be peachy. I am coughing like a seal with a three-pack a day habit, a seal who hangs out under the dock and steals French fries from unsuspecting tourists, a seal who works as a carnie with a traveling fair and writes rambling screeds about walrus conspiracy theories. I sound like a Seal Gone Bad.
Thanks to a generous contribution from Mary Pearson and Aliya, who contributed from England (!), I am 94% on the way to making my Team in Training fund raising goal. All I need is another $150. Will you put me over the top?
OK, the fresh air is killing me. Back into the cave I go.
2008 Resolution Tracker Week 7 - Miles Run: 22, YTD: 146.75 Week 7 - Days Written: 7, YTD: 49
We got about 18 inches of snow yesterday. The Forest looks like someone painted it with thick fondant icing. I drove through a white-out down to Syracuse (where they didn't get any of the storm at all, not even a flake) so I could talk about writing historical fiction to a group of teachers.
These weary warriors had worked all day, then came to the OCM BOCES for my talk, which is part of an ongoing series for history teachers. Thank you all for your kind attention and for the pickles.
Today is a spinning plate day. I have to go over the page proofs for Independent Dames with magnifying glasses and a fine-toothed comb, work on my WIP draft, send more content to Theo for the website update, deal with old email and sneak in a run.
Speaking of running (yeah, you knew that was coming, didn't you?).... I am 81% of the way to reaching my fundraising goal for the the Team in Training Half Marathon. (The money goes to fund cancer research, which pretty much affects everyone, so share some love. Please.) I will send a copy of the TWISTED audio version to whomever puts me over the top!
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