Global Integrity contributor Sherif Mansour (currently working with Freedom House), writes on the challenge that activism via Facebook, a social networking website, presents to a country where the government is uneasy with full popular democracy, and has a history of online censorship. Egypt’s Facebook showdownThe online gathering place for young people poses a challenge to…
Global Integrity’s Kepher Otieno has been busy muckracking in Kenya. Here he details a distressed company’s creative bookkeeping that should be all too familiar to readers familiar with Enron, Worldcom and the like. Corruption & fraud: it’s not just a Western-nation problem.Livelihood threatened at troubled Sony By Kepher Otieno The Sony Sugar Outgrowers Company (Soc)…
Last week we reported on corruption cases in the United States border patrol. The solitary and remote nature of border crossings, plus the authority inherent in the border police, creates a classic scenario of “Opacity + Discretion = Corruption”. Here, Global Integrity’s Farid Abbasov looks at corruption on the borders of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan: Border Patrol…
The story of shoddy construction in Chinese schools, and the grim — and uneven — tally of the May 12 quake is not going away. Well-built government offices still stand near collapsed schools, and parents are demanding answers. Faced with such horrible news, Chinese citizens are demanding accountability: why were schools so poorly built? Who…
We’ve been frequently making the case that corruption is about more than just bribes — it’s the sweetheart contracts to military suppliers; it’s campaign finance systems that allow unlimited or undisclosed donations; it’s public misinformation through complacent media. We take this moment to observe that corruption is also about big envelopes fat with cash. The…
The New York Times reports on an uptick in corruption cases against U.S. border patrol agents protecting the U.S.-Mexico border. It would seem that killing the Border Patrol’s internal affairs unit was a rather bad idea. The fact that there is corruption tied to smuggling drugs and people across the border is not a surprise…