A daily scrapbook of stories from major news media on corruption, bribery and financial crimes that undermine good governance and harm common prosperity
JAKARTA - Only the president of Indonesia has the authority to dismiss two corruption court judges who were recently arrested for allegedly accepting bribes, The Jakarta Post reported a Supreme Court spokesman as saying. Two Indonesian anti-corruption judges were arrested on Aug. 17 after allegedly accepting more than Rp 100 million (US$10,500) in bribes.
LIMA - Graft allegations targeted at the brother of President Ollanta Humala have sparked renewed bickering between members of Peru’s ruling family, Bloomberg reports. A congressional panel has sought permission to investigate Alexis Humala after a report alleged that Krasny del Peru, a pharmaceuticals company in which he’s a shareholder, won more than 500 million soles ($191 million) of government contracts even though Peruvian law bars relatives of public officials from bidding in state tenders.
AUGUST 22:
BOGOTA - Colombia's Supreme Court has ordered that alleged bribery cases against several former ministers be unified, according to Colombia Reports. The ex-officials are being investigated for allegedly offering bribes to politicians in exchange for their vote in favour of a 2004 constitutional change that authorised former President Alvaro Uribe to run for re-election in 2006. The accused include former ministers Sabas Pretelt and Diego Palacio, and former presidential secretary Alberto Velasquez.
PARIS – France’s financial information unit, Tracfin, has alerted the authorities to more than 1,000 potential cases of money laundering in 2011, amounting to 868 million euros, according to news agency AFP. Tracfin reported almost half the cases to the justice system and the rest to the police, customs, tax revenue and other services. Security firms, the fast-food sector, the art market and professional training companies are particularly at risk of being used for money laundering, Tracfin said in a report issued on Wednesday.
AUGUST 21:
BEIJING - China will implement a five-year plan for eliminating corruption after the upcoming national congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), top official He Guoqiang said according to the news agency Xinhua. He, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPC, expressed readiness to improve anti-corruption efforts, describing the improvements as a "dynamic and long-term strategic project."
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 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.
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