A daily scrapbook of stories from major news media on corruption, bribery and financial crimes that undermine good governance and harm common prosperity
SYDNEY - A secret memo sent to the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) five years ago detailing bribery and corruption within a subsidiary of the central bank was withheld from the police, Australia’s parliament and the government, The Age newspaper reports. The revelation of the five-page memo ties RBA Governor Glenn Stevens and his recently retired deputy Ric Battellino to one of the worst corporate corruption cover-ups in Australian history.
NEW DELH - India's main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said it will continue to confront the government and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on corruption until they resign. "There are scams worth lakhs of crore of rupees but perpetrators are being protected,” senior BJP leader Venkaiah Naidu told reporters outside parliament, the Economic Times of India reports.
ALEXANDRIA, Virginia - A retired Colombian police general has pleaded guilty to U.S. corruption charges that he fed critical secret information to the country's murderous right-wing paramilitary warlords and drug dealers even while acting as former President Alvaro Uribe’s security chief, the Wall Street Journal reports. The incident is a stark reminder of how deeply drug-related corruption can run even in countries that have made progress in fighting the cocaine trade.
NAIROBI - Ted Dagne, an Ethiopian-American, touched off a firestorm when he sent a bold and explosive letter. Signed by the South Sudanese president, it chastised its powerful recipients for stealing $4 billion from the world’s newest country, before it was even born. The letter’s origins tell of a deeper story, one in which America’s newest friend in Africa has turned out to be far less friendly than hoped, and international efforts to create a reliable democracy in an unstable region are faltering badly, the Kansas City Star reports.
JAKARTA – The Indonesian government is considering shutting down corruption courts at the provincial level after difficulties in finding judges with sufficient integrity who can stamp out rampant graft, the Jakarta Post reports. Part of the reason for centralising anti-corruption courts was due to the recent arrest of two anti-graft judges who were caught accepting bribes of around 150 million Rupiah ($16,000), the paper added.
AUGUST 20:
SYDNEY - The former chief financial officer of Securency International Pty, which supplied material for printing money to the Reserve Bank of Australia, was given a six-month suspended sentence in a bribery case, Bloomberg News reports. David Ellery, 56, pleaded guilty to one charge of false accounting in the probe of former managers and employees at Note Printing Australia Ltd. and Securency, which is a joint venture of the central bank. Securency officials have been charged with bribing officials in Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam to win currency-printing contracts.
AUGUST 17:
ABUJA – A World Bank study conducted in 26 Nigerian states indicates about 80 percent of businesses in the country paid bribes to government officials in 2011 to stay in business, the Wall Street Journal reports citing allAfrica.
LONDON – Britain declared war on corrupt practices at home and abroad when it implemented far-reaching anti-bribery legislation last year. The emerging scandal over questionable payments in a security contract with Saudi Arabia will put the government’s resolve to its first big test. At issue is whether there is one law for petty bribery and another for the politically and economically complicated world of big defence, the Financial Times says in an editorial.
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