International organisations need to tackle corruption "from every side", Angel Gurria told TrustLaw
PARIS (TrustLaw) – International institutions clamping down on corruption must work closer together and tackle graft “from every side,” the secretary general of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development told TrustLaw this week.
“We worked with the World Bank, with the institutions that provide financing. Now, the machinery needs to be better coordinated, better oiled and at the same time, better informed of what the others are doing,” Angel Gurria told TrustLaw on the sidelines of the International Bar Association’s 10th Annual Anti-Corruption Conference in Paris.
Gurria also said that the OECD would be working closer with the Financial Action Task Force, a semi-independent body within the OECD which focuses on promoting policies to combat money laundering, the financing of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
“Now, it is clearly becoming more and more necessary that all these institutions have to fight... the tax side for example, the anti-bribery, the (illicit) flows, the recovery of assets, you need to tackle it from every side,” Gurria added.
But he said coordination between institutions was starting to improve.
“That I think is not only happening but also I think it is happening very naturally. In the case of illicit flows, clearly that is a very key part of the work,” he said.
TACKLE DEMAND SIDE
In a keynote speech at the conference, he told an audience of lawyers the OECD must do more to clamp down on public officials who request and receive bribes and not just prosecute those who give them.
“We also need to make further progress in tackling the demand side of corruption,” Gurria said at the conference.
“While the OECD has a unique focus on tackling the supply side of foreign bribery, we also recognise the need to deal with the receiving end of the corrupt transaction,” Gurria added.
“This includes both public officials who solicit and accept bribes, and also the need to ensure that assets stolen through corruption are returned.”
Gurria’s speech comes 15 years after the creation of the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions. Signatories to the convention have to submit themselves to a rigorous, peer-review monitoring system which anti-graft watchdog Transparency International has called “the gold standard” of anti-bribery monitoring.
The OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention was the first international anti-bribery convention – coming seven years before the U.N. Convention Against Corruption – and was hailed by anti-graft campaigners at the time as ground-breaking.
However, as Gurria acknowledged, enforcement of the convention is one of the OECD’s “main challenges”. Of the 39 states that are party to the convention, only 13 have concluded foreign bribery prosecutions, he said.
(Editing by Rebekah Curtis)
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