Laurence Cockcroft - Unmasked: Corruption in the West

Laurence Cockcroft is a development economist. He is a founder of Transparency International, the global civil society organisation against corruption, and was formerly chairman of its UK chapter. He is the author of Global Corruption: Money, Power and Ethics in the Modern World and Africas Way: A Journey from the Past (both I.B.Tauris).

Anne-Christine Wegener is a political scientist and anti-corruption analyst based in Frankfurt. She was previously deputy director and programme manager at Transparency International UK, focusing on defence and security.

This is an important book on an uncomfortable subject. Corruption is big business and hugely damaging. Defeating it will take a focused effort by governments, and that will only happen if people wake up to what is going on.

Paul Collier, author of Exodus: Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century

In Unmasked, Cockcroft and Wegener provide a needed antidote to the idea that corruption is a malady confined to the developing world. In this clear-headed analysis, they systematically show how the West's political donors, big business, offshore havens, and organised crime have created a parallel universe of corrupt deals and conflicts of interest that cost all of us dearly. If you care about transparency and a clean society, put this book on your reading list.

David E. Kaplan, Global Investigative
Journalism Network

This thorough analysis of contemporary corruption in the developed world goes beyond the scandals that regularly attract attention and probes the complex forces that undermine politics, business and contemporary life. This path-breaking book combines fine research with a highly readable text making it accessible to a broad audience. This work will advance in important ways our understanding of what we must do to address this corrosive corruption.

Louise I. Shelley, author of Dirty Entanglements:
Corruption, Crime and Terrorism

This is a tour de force, exposing the essence of how our global predatory economic system has captured and corrupted our supposedly democratic societies. Cockcroft and Wegener brilliantly describe how, far from simple cash exchanges in brown envelopes, corruption is a rampant cancer sitting in the heart of our countries democratic systems of checks and balances. At a moment of ever-more corporate scandals, rising demagoguery of populist politicians, and massive voter outrage, confusion and disengagement, this could not be a more prescient and urgent read for all those who wish to see democracy mean something where those elected by the people, actually serve the interests of the people.

Simon Taylor, Co-founder and Director,
Global Witness

Laurence Cockcroft and Anne-Christine Wegener

UNMASKED

Corruption in the West

For our children: Mathilda, Lola and Philippa and grandchildren: Meredith and Adam

Contents

Tables and Figures

Preface

Corruption in the West is overlooked and underplayed. This book sets out to correct the record by showing that influence is bought and power is sold on both sides of the Atlantic. This is true for many areas including politics, sports and the business world. By now, corruption as a subject has moved up the global agenda and is increasingly being recognised as a threat in Europe and America. It is mainly the corruption of influence rather than the corruption of brown paper envelopes.

As the authors of this book, we have been engaged in advocacy work in relation to corruption under the banner of Transparency International (TI). Laurence Cockcroft was a co-founder of TI in the early 1990s, and chairman of its UK chapter from 2000 to 2008. Anne-Christine Wegener was the deputy director of the TI Defence and Security Programme, based in the UK, for five years and has been working on other sectoral anti-corruption issues since, currently with Germanys international development cooperation agency, GIZ. In 2013, we decided to write the book from a sense that while corruption was a serious global problem, it was important to maintain a focus on the West, and that corruption needed to be unmasked in order to be recognised much more widely.

We also realised that corruption means different things to different people, both professionally and morally. In conversations with lawyers, one will often be assured that fraud is a very different matter to corruption. People in business may well argue that cartels are not really corrupt. Those in banking may argue that exaggerated risk-taking can never reach the stage of being corrupt. However, in this book we have taken a very broad definition of corruption that ranges from bribery to forms of political lobbying, to the dramas played out in international sports in late 2015 to the crises in banking circles since 2007/8.

We have been writing at a time when the international attention to corruption at least measured by the actions proposed at summits of the G8 and G20 has never been higher. But the content of our book suggests that the reality within the countries of the EU, and of the US and Canada, falls well short of these ambitious agendas, and shows how important it is to bridge the gap and match action to words. This is particularly true at a time when the values of liberal democracy are under fire as never before, on the European continent itself, in parts of the developing world and from radical Islamist circles for whom corruption is a key rallying call.

Our concern has also been to show that corruption does not only impact directly on lives in the developing world but also in the West, although often in more subtle ways. Doctors may be pressurised to prescribe a certain drug, traders in financial markets may be tempted by the very high returns from rate-fixing, an automobile engineer may design exhaust systems that deliberately evade emissions standards. So the issue is real for many citizens in the West, even if often behind a mask of normality. There is every reason why the developed societies of the West should be prepared to face these questions, for their own future.