Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks has made it their trade to host content censored online. While this brings to mind China or Myanmar, their most challenging threats have come from the West — in this case, they’ve posted a series of stories quietly scrubbed from the archives of British papers by a hyperactive British libel law. The…
DetailsThe European engineering giant settles a massive bribery case, pays US$1.6 billion in fines, and somehow manages to stay off US government blacklists, which (in theory) prohibit giving contracts to companies who pay bribes. Daniel Kaufmann has an analysis of the echoing hollowness of Seimens’s previous CSR commitments. Kaufmann writes: “The case of Siemens illustrates…
DetailsThe Madoff Ponzi scheme fraud (covered here and here) is already claiming victims, including the JEHT Foundation in New York. While not overly active in anti-corruption funding per se, JEHT was part of a family of like-minded, progressive foundations that operated in this space. Scary stuff. Here is the text of JEHT President Bob Crane’s…
DetailsGlobal Integrity’s managing director reflects on Dr. Daniel Kaufmann’s retirement and call to action on issues of state capture and grand corruption. In short: we enthusiastically agree that patronage networks, political financing and high level abuse of power are the most urgent governance challenges, but differ somewhat with Dani on how to usefully tackle the…
DetailsIn the last eight years, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has doubled its budget. While development has been quietly elevated to stand alongside defense and diplomacy as instruments of American power, USAID itself is adrift, argue three former USAID directors, writing in Foreign Affairs. J. Brian Atwood, M. Peter McPherson, and Andrew Natsios…
DetailsHow could Global Integrity not blog on this one? Governor Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois was arrested on charges of corruption and bribery after an ongoing investigation uncovered examples of the governor selling political favors in exchange for campaign contributions to his fundraising organization, Friends of Blagojevich. Much of the media attention has focused on…
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