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