LONDON: It is clear that the report of the Commission for Africa will identify corruption as a major impediment to development, and it will recognize that countries in the north will have to restrain their own companies from fuelling that corruption. But to what extent is the UK itself fulfilling that obligation?
First, from 1997 to 2001 the government dragged its heels in meeting its international obligations to criminalize overseas bribery, only at the last minute adding clauses to the Anti-Terrorist Act of 2001, which were themselves less than complete. It followed up with a corruption bill, but a scrutiny committee of parliament advised that it was too obscurantist to be effective, and a revised version has yet to be presented.
Second, follow-up to the legislation passed in 2001 has not led to a single prosecution in the courts, although several cases have been widely aired in the press in Kenya, and more than 30 allegations of overseas bribery are reported to have been referred to the National Criminal Intelligence Service here. The allocation of responsibility for prosecuting such offences remains in the diverse hands of 43 police forces, the SFO and the CPS — and apparently will not be a priority for the proposed Serious and Organized Crime Agency, which is to be created to combat forms of organized crime.
Third, the Export Credits Guarantee Department, having introduced a set of stronger anti-bribery guidelines for its clients in May 2004, was obliged by the DTI to withdraw them in November on the grounds that they were too tough for three large-scale clients in the defence and aerospace industries. Yet there is no way that a strategy to control overseas bribery can work without it being clearly effective in the arms sector.
Fourth, the scope for the laundering of the fruits of corruption in the UK remains high. This is partly sustained by the use of trusts and shell companies, a sector in which the service providers are effectively unregulated, although this is no longer the case in Guernsey and other haven jurisdictions. When such corruptly gained assets are identified, the UK regime in relation to their repatriation is obscure. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
(The writer is chairman of Transparency International, UK)
