Meet global corruptions hidden players Charmian Gooch

when we talk about corruption there are

typical types of individuals that spring

to mind there’s the former Soviet

megalomaniacs SAP amourette Nia’s off he

was one of them until his death in 2006

he was the all-powerful leader of

Turkmenistan the Central Asian country

rich in natural gas now he really loved

to issue presidential decrees and one

renamed the months of the year including

after himself and his mother he spent

millions of dollars creating a bizarre

personality cult and his crowning glory

was the building of a 40 foot high

gold-plated statue of himself which

stood proudly in the capital central

square and rotated to follow the Sun he

was a slightly unusual guy and then

there’s that cliche the African dictator

or minister or official there’s tier

Doran Oh being so his daddy is president

for life of Equatorial Guinea a West

African nation that has exported

billions of dollars of oil since the

1990s and yet has a truly appalling

human rights record the vast majority of

its people are living in really

miserable poverty despite an income per

capita that’s on a par with that of

Portugal surabhi Young Jr well he buys

himself a 30 million dollar mansion in

malibu california i’ve been up to its

front gates i can tell you it’s a

magnificent spread people an 18 million

euro art collection that used to belong

to fashion designer you Sandler on a

stack of fabulous sports cars some

costing a million dollars apiece oh and

a Gulfstream jet to now get this until

recently he was earning an official

monthly salary of less than seven

thousand dollars and this dan etete a

well he was a former oil minister of

Nigeria under President Abacha and it

just so happens he’s a convicted money

andhra too we spent a great deal of time

investigating a billion dollar that’s

right a billion-dollar oil deal that he

was involved with and what we found was

pretty shocking but more about that

later so it’s easy to think that

corruption happens somewhere come over

there carried out by a bunch of greedy

despots and individuals up to no good in

countries that we personally may know

very little about and feel really

unconnected to and unaffected by what

might be going on but does it just

happen over there well at 22 I was very

lucky my first job out of university was

investigating the illegal trade in

African ivory and that’s how my

relationship with corruption really

began in 1993 with two friends who were

colleagues Simon Taylor and Patrick Ali

we set up an organization called Global

Witness our first campaign was

investigating the role of illegal

logging in funding the war in Cambodia

so a few years later and it’s now 1997

and I’m in Angola undercover

investigating blood diamonds perhaps you

saw the film The Hollywood film blood

diamond the one with leonardo dicaprio

or some of that sprang from from our

work Luanda it was full of land mine

victims who were struggling to survive

on the streets and war orphans living in

sewers under the streets and a tiny very

wealthy elite who gossiped about

shopping trips to Brazil and Portugal

and it was a slightly crazy place so I’m

sitting in a hot and very stuffy hotel

room feeling just totally overwhelmed

but it wasn’t about blood diamonds

because I’d been speaking to lots of

people there who will they talked about

a different problem that of a massive

web of corruption on a global scale and

millions of oil dollars going missing

and for what was there a very small

organization of just a few people trying

to even begin to think how we might

tackle that was an enormous challenge

and in the years that I’ve been and

we’ve all been campaigning an

investigator

I’ve repeatedly seen that what makes

corruption on a global massive scale

possible well it it isn’t just greed or

the misuse of power or that nebulous

phrase weak governance I mean yes it’s

all of those but corruption it’s made

possible by the actions of global

facilitators so let’s go back to some of

those people I talked about earlier now

they’re all people we’ve investigated

and they’re all people who couldn’t do

what they do alone take obiang jr. well

he didn’t end up with high-end art and

luxury houses without help he did

business with global banks a bank in

Paris held accounts of companies

controlled by him one of which was used

by the art and American banks will they

funneled 73 million dollars into the

states some of which was used to buy

that Californian mansion and he didn’t

do all this in his own name either he

use shell companies he used one to buy

the property and another which was in

somebody else’s name to pay the huge

bills it costs to run the place and then

there’s dan etete a well when he was oil

minister he awarded an oil block now

worth over a billion dollars to a

company that guess what yeah he was the

hidden owner of now it was then much

later traded on with the kind assistance

of a Nigerian government I have to be

careful what I say here two subsidiaries

of shell and the Italian any two of the

biggest oil companies around so the

reality is is that the engine of

corruption well it exists far beyond the

shores of countries like Equatorial

Guinea or Nigeria or Turkmenistan this

engine well it’s driven by our

international banking system by the

problem of anonymous shell companies by

the secrecy that we have afforded big

oil gas and mining operations and most

of all by the failure of our politicians

to back up their rhetoric and do

something really meaningful and systemic

to tackle this stuff now let’s take the

bank’s first well it’s not going to come

as any surprise for me to tell you that

banks accept dirty money

but they prioritize their profits and

other destructive ways too for example

in Sarawak Malaysia now this region it

has just five percent of its forests

left intact five percent so how did that

happen well because an elite and its

facilitators have been making millions

of dollars from supporting logging on an

industrial scale for many years so we

sent an undercover investigator in to

secretly film meetings with members of

the ruling elite and the resulting

footage well it made some people very

angry and you can see that on YouTube

but it proved what we had long suspected

because it showed how the state’s chief

minister despite his later denials use

his control over land and forest

licences to enrich himself and his

family and HSBC well we know that HSBC

bankrolled the region’s largest logging

companies that were responsible for some

of that destruction in Sarawak and

elsewhere the bank violated its own

sustainability policies in the process

but it earned around a hundred and

thirty million dollars now shortly after

our expose a very shortly after our

expose earlier this year the bank

announced a policy review on this and

well is this progress um maybe but we’re

going to be keeping a very close eye on

that case and then there’s the problem

of anonymous shell companies well we’ve

all heard about what they are I think

and we all know they used quite a bit by

people and companies who are trying to

avoid paying their proper dues to

society also known as taxes but what

doesn’t usually come to light is how

shell companies are used to steal huge

sums of money transformational sums of

money from poor countries in virtually

every case of corruption that we’ve

investigated shell companies have

appeared and sometimes it’s been

impossible to find out who was really

involved in the deal a recent study by

the World Bank looked at 200 cases of

corruption it found that over seventy

percent of those cases had used

anonymous shell companies totaling

almost fifty six billion dollars now

many of these companies were in america

and the united kingdom its overseas

territories and Crown Dependencies and

so it’s not just an offshore problem

it’s an onshore one to a sea shell

companies there central to the secret

deals which may benefit wealthy elites

rather than ordinary citizens one

striking recent case that we’ve

investigated is how the government in

the Democratic Republic of Congo sold

off a series of valuable state-owned

mining assets to shell companies in the

British Virgin Islands so we spoke to

sources in country trawl through company

documents and other information trying

to piece together a really true picture

of the deal and we were alarmed to find

that these shell companies have quickly

flipped many of the assets on for huge

profits to major international mining

companies listed in London now the

Africa progress panel led by Kofi Annan

they’ve calculated that Congo may have

lost more than 1.3 billion dollars from

these deals that’s more than twice

that’s almost twice the country’s annual

health and education budget combined and

will the people of Congo will they ever

get their money back well the answer to

that question and who was really

involved and what really happened well

that’s going to probably remain locked

away in the secretive company registries

of the British Virgin Islands and

elsewhere unless we all do something

about it and how about the oil gas and

mining companies okay maybe it’s a bit

of a cliche to talk about them

corruption in that sector no surprise as

corruption everywhere so why focus on

that sector well because there’s a lot

at stake in 2011 natural resource

exports outweighed aid flows by almost

19 21 in Africa Asia and Latin America

19 21 now that’s a hell of a lot of

schools and universities and hospitals

and business startups many of which

haven’t

alized and never will because some of

that money has simply been stolen away

now let’s go back to the oil and mining

companies and let’s go back to dan etete

a and that billion-dollar deal and I

forgive me i’m going to read big the

next bit because it’s a very live issue

and our lawyers have been through this

in some detail and they want me to get

it right now on the surface the deal

appeared straightforward subsidiaries of

shell and any paid the Nigerian

government for the block the Nigerian

government transferred precisely the

same amount to the very dollar to an

account earmarked for a shell company

whose hidden owner was a tete a now it’s

not bad going for a convicted money

launderer and here’s the thing after

many months of digging around and

reading through hundreds of pages of

court documents we found evidence that

in fact shell and any had known that the

funds would be transferred to that shell

company and frankly it’s hard to believe

they didn’t know who they were really

dealing with there now it just shouldn’t

take these sort of efforts to find out

where the money in deals like this went

I mean these are state assets they’re

supposed to be used for the benefit of

the people in the country but in some

countries citizens and journalists who

are trying to expose stories like this

have been harassed and arrested and some

have even risked their lives to do so

and finally well there are those who

believe that corruption is unavoidable

it’s just how some business is done it’s

too complex difficult to change so in

effect what we just accept it but as a

campaigner and investigator I have a

different view because I’ve seen what

can happen when an idea gains momentum

in the oil and mining sector for example

there is now the beginning of a truly

worldwide transparency standard that

could tackle some of these problems in

1999 when global witness called for oil

companies to make payments on deals

transparent well some people laughed at

the extreme naivety of that small idea

but literally hundreds of civil society

groups from around the world came

together to fight for transparency and

now it’s fast becoming the norm and the

law two-thirds of the value of the

world’s oil and mining companies are now

covered by transparency laws two-thirds

so this is change happening this is

progress but but we’re not there yet by

far because it really isn’t about

corruption somewhere over there is it in

a globalized world corruption is a truly

globalized business and one that needs

global solutions supported and pushed by

us all as global citizens right here

thank

you