Enforcement - Presentation to The Taskforce on Transparency

Presentation to A Web Event Hosted by The Transparency TaskForce (UK)

September 4, 2025. Frank Vogl

Introduction

It is a great pleasure to be presenting to this meeting of the Taskforce on Transparency, and thank you Andy Agathangelou for inviting me today to talk briefly about two books I have written – The Enablers and Waging War on Corruption – and some of today’s global anti-corruption issues.

I have been intensively in the anti-corruption game for 35 years and I wish I could bring you good news. For many years, I believed that the global anti-corruption movement was making a great deal of progress. Today – right now – we can claim that we have won many important battles. But, we are at risk of losing the war.

I don’t think the global anti-corruption movement adequately appreciates the risks that we confront. There is an increasing bias towards ever-deeper research, and to campaigning on yesterday’s issues, and sometimes, to target campaigns at the highest levels to the wrong forums. For example, the G7 and the G20, and to a large degree the UN, are relics of the past.

It started with Watergate

So let me start with some background and some history. As I wrote in Waging War on Corruption, it all started with Watergate. In 1974, I was a reporter in Washington for The Times (UK). President Nixon resigned that August, investigations of illegal corporate campaign contributions started, followed by investigations of bribery of foreign government officials by multilateral companies – bribes to Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, to the Prime Minister of Japan, to the Communist Party of Italy, and to many more.

The coming into law of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, signed by President Carter, was the start of the modern era of anti-corruption. The next phase can be dated just as precisely to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Until then, Western governments were much more concerned with securing allies against the Soviet Union, even including the massively corrupt Mobuto in the Congo, than worrying about corruption. Now, with the Cold War over, people asked: what is foreign aid for? If it is to reduce poverty and secure development, then how can taxpayers be assured that the funds are not stolen?

Launching TI

My book traces the origins of Transparency International back to 1990. The inspiration was that of my former World Bank colleague Peter Eigen, TI’s first Chairman and I was a Vice Chairman. Together with a group of friends who knew a lot more about corruption than we did, we created Transparency International – TI – as the first global not-for-profit dedicated solely to the reduction of corruption.

The Economist called us dreamers – with a cartoon of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and when we told folks what we were doing they would say “Oh, how nice!”

Yet, within very few years, we had waged a successful campaign to convince the World Bank and all aid agencies to prioritize anti-corruption after decades of flatly ignoring the issue. We took a leading role in the successful campaign to secure an OECD Anti-Bribery Convention modeled on the FCPA. We started to convince UN leaders that the UN needed to recognize and address corruption. And in 1995, we published the first TI Corruption Perception Index that has had an enormous impact on securing public attention to government graft.

Civil society activism

The anti-corruption endeavor’s first phase started with Watergate, the second with the ending of the USSR, and the start of the third phase was the catalyst for writing this book. I was in Cairo in late 2009 and met many Egyptian scholars who told me that the country was about to blow up – the Mubarak regime was going to drown in its vast vat of corruption. And, sure enough, the Arab Spring erupted in early 2011. I wrote this book to highlight the exceptional bravery of activists in civil society, from Cairo to Moscow, from Buenos Aires to Tunis. I recall how I was in a meeting of Transparency International colleagues from Morocco, South Korea, South Africa and Nepal, and I suddenly realized that I was the only one who had not spent any time in jail.

I wrote this book to highlight the exceptional bravery of activists in civil society, from Cairo to Moscow, from Buenos Aires to Tunis. I recall how I was in a meeting of Transparency International colleagues from Morocco, South Korea, South Africa and Nepal, and I suddenly realized that I was the only one who had not spent any time in jail.

Why did so many people in so many corrupt, authoritarian-ruled countries risk prison, risk their lives to wage war against corruption?

I wanted to tell their stories and stimulate public support for them and their actions. Every act of corruption has a victim. They suffer from sexual corruption, from petty extortion by the police, from demands for bribes by doctors and teachers, and local public officials, not to mention suffering from the consequences of grand corruption perpetrated by top politicians, their cronies and senior civil servants. The courageous civil society activists are the only ones, most of the time, striving to assist the victims and defend potential victims.

I have great respect for example for William Browder and all that he has done in the name of his one-time Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitzky. Magnitzky was one of many victims of Russia’s corrupt regime. As the Magnitzky story was unfolding, I do not think there was enough international focus on the exceptional bravery of his mother, Natalia Magnitskaya, who I write about briefly in the book, who held press conferences and campaigned in Moscow for the government to tell the truth about her son’s murder in a Russian prison. She could so easily have become yet another victim.

At the time I recall a visit to Moscow and chatting with Elena Panfilova, the founder of TI Russia, who noted that she had recently typed a letter of protest to the government, but decided not to send it. Nevertheless, the next day she received a phone call from state security that started with the person saying – I see you have written a letter of complaint. Elena’s bravery, Natalia’s bravery, and that of so many others every day in countries run by brutal, corrupt regimes needed to be publicized as widely as possible.

There are many heroes who are unsung who lead anti-corruption across the globe and my books wanted to shine a bright light on these courageous people who are speaking truth to power.

I concluded the book by recalling the Nobel Peace prize ceremony in December 2011, as the award went to three African women – Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee from Liberia and Tawakkol Karman from Yemen. Thorbjorn Jagland, chair of the prize committee, quoted James Baldwin who wrote: “The people who walked in darkness are no longer prepared to do so.”

Mr. Jagland added, “ Make a note of that! – all those who wish to be on the right side of history.”

Enforcement and money laundering

When I wrote a new Forward and Afterword for the 2016 paperback edition of Waging War Against Corruption, I started by noting: A new era is dawning in the global fight against corruption. We are moving into a period where the focus will be entirely on enforcement. The challenge is to ensure the implementation of major pledges by world leaders, national laws and international conventions. This challenge includes the mobilization by civil society of grassroots citizen support across the world to encourage and to empower public prosecutors and judges to pursue the corrupt relentlessly.

If there is a valid criticism of this book, and indeed of the TI Corruption Perceptions Index as well, then it is that for long we tended to focus too much on corruption in the global south. Corruption, of course is universal.

Trillions of pounds of dirty cash are parked in the world’s Western financial centers and for the most part the governments of Western countries have turned a blind eye, failing to adequately enforce anti-money laundering and anti-corruption laws and regulations.

The inadequacy of enforcement and the willingness of Western governments to ignore corruption, and human rights, as they enter strategic relationships with kleptocratic governments across the globe, inevitably encourages corruption. My book The Enablers sought to sound the alarm, as highlighted in the sub-title: “How The West Supports Kleptocrats And Corruption – Endangering Our Democracy.”

I shine a spotlight on the biggest banks that have been at the forefront of money laundering and who, when caught, receive fines that they view as just the costs of doing business. I shine a light on the art auction houses who fail to do due diligence on the buyers and the sellers of Picassos and Monets and the like. I shine a light on Londongrad and the real estate centers of the globe that compete with each other to attract dirty cash from Russians and Chinese and Greeks and Africans and gangsters from across the world.

The word “enablers” was used infrequently when I wrote the book and today it is commonplace. But my advocacy in this book, both at the technical level including calling for prosecutions of top bankers when their institutions pay bribes and launder vast sums of cash, to calling for a restoration of basic values of integrity and honesty in the foreign relationships pursued by our governments, have fallen on deaf ears.

Sadly so, as the warnings in my book are even more valid and urgent today than they were four years ago when the book was first published. Donald Trump hosted the President of Azerbaijan at the White House and who, after all cares, that the regime jails journalists, jails pro-democracy activists, launders vast sums of stolen cash into the UK and elsewhere?

You will not find any mention of that when you read the major U.S. press’s coverage of President Alieyev visit to the White House.

Ignoring abusive regimes

Why do the British applaud so loudly the investments and sponsorship by the Emirates of Premiere League soccer, Wimbledon tennis and the like, while ignoring not only the massive gold shipments, in return for arms, to Dubai from Sudan that is fueling genocide, not to mention Dubai serving as the home of sanctioned oligarchs and the likes of the Gupta brothers who plundered South Africa?

Why is it that so few people seem to have taken notice that one of the items on the agenda of a White House lunch with Pakistan’s Field Marshall Asim Munir was cryptocurrency, given that the government of Pakistan had signed a deal with World Financial Liberty, the crypto-currency business of President Trump, his diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff and their sons.

And, who cares about conflicts of interest and ethics in government, when an Emirates sovereign wealth fund invests $2 billion in World Financial Liberty, or when it invested in the private equity firm run by Ivanka Trump’s husband Jared Kushner?

And why were members of the House of Lords not obliged to fully reveal all of their business dealings – including those with Russian oligarchs? Indeed, why did the UK stock exchange for many years make great efforts to attract listings from Russian companies, while having an open door to bond raising ventures by Gazprom – a company totally controlled by the Kremlin?

Why is it that so many sovereign bonds have been underwritten and managed by UK firms for countries headed by authoritarian regimes that are notoriously corrupt?

When the massive Danske Bank money laundering scandal broke it was evident that a considerable amount of cash went into UK holding companies – who in the UK was investigated and was prosecuted?

Concerning prospects

We are failing to counter corruption in our midst and in the policies of Western governments and the costs are rising. At the end of my book I quote Paul Volcker, the brilliant late chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, who in his memoir, published shortly before his death, wrote” “Unavoidably, I end this memoir with a sense of deep concern. The rising tide of progress toward open democratic societies – the world in which I have lived and served – seems to be ebbing away.”

A few weeks ago, I went to Atlanta and visited the home, and the memorial to Martin Luther King. I visited the cemetery where many of his most ardent followers are buried, including John Lewis, who devoted his long life to the struggle for justice. He was and he remains an inspiration to all of us civil society activists who believe that we can win, despite all the setbacks. As I quote in my book, Lewis said: “I have witnessed betrayal, corruption, bombing, lunacy, conspiracy, and even assassination – and I have still kept marching on.”

We must counter today’s dire trends – but it demands that all of you double your efforts to support civil society activists who are on the right side of history. Thank you.