Transnational governance networks against grand corruption: cross-border cooperation among law enforcement
May 2022
Research Paper 08
Professor Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett , Centre for the Study of Corruption, University of Sussex
Dr Slobodan Tomić, University of York
SOC ACE Project: Transnational governance networks against grand corruption: law enforcement and investigative journalists
PUBLICATION SUMMARY
Grand corruption occurs when senior politicians and public officials abuse their power to embezzle large sums from the state. They typically also launder this money using the global financial system, setting up shell companies in offshore secrecy jurisdictions to conceal the provenance of their corrupt proceeds. Grand corruption damages the economic and social development of the countries from which funds are stolen, as well as undermining the rule of law.
Fighting grand corruption requires transnational cooperation among law enforcement agencies, to be able to ‘follow the money’ on its typically complex route around the globe. However, law enforcement agencies typically encounter many obstacles when they try to cooperate, some of them technical but others arising from weak resources or power imbalances. Existing international organisations such as INTERPOL and EUROPOL are not able to overcome these problems efficiently, partly because their formal mandates limit them to facilitating bilateral cooperation.
This problem relates to wider literature on the rise of voluntary transnational governance networks as collective action responses to problems deriving from globalisation. In many cases, these networks comprise private sector organisations and focus on setting standards and norms for self-regulation, or NGOs and think tanks that spread knowledge.
This paper sheds light on how a certain group of substate actors – law enforcement agencies – have formed a coalition of the willing to cooperate among themselves and support non-member agencies in sharing intelligence to fight grand corruption. It studies one particular innovation in this area, the International Anti-Corruption Coordination Centre (IACCC), a unit set up following the 2016 London Anti-Corruption Summit with core funding from the UK government. The IACCC is a result of voluntary cooperation among the law enforcement agencies of six countries (Singapore plus the ‘Five Eyes’, a pre-existing intelligence-sharing alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the United States), as well as nine associate partners.
The Centre was set up to improve the efficiency of transnational grand corruption investigations, by assisting investigators and prosecutors from jurisdictions all around the world, many of whom lack the resources, expertise or political support needed to pursue grand corruption crimes. It is able to take an overview of intelligence collected from its multiple partners and provide a composite intelligence package to the requesting state. This is a more integrated service than INTERPOL or Europol can provide, since they are permitted only to facilitate bilateral connections, meaning that many information asymmetries remain.
The paper provides evidence on three ways in which the IACCC enhances the global fight against grand corruption:
By enhancing understanding among overseas law enforcement agencies about how to draft a request for mutual legal assistance (MLA) to which the UK authorities can respond, and helping to shepherd requests through the system.
By reducing the uncertainty and costs of pursuing grand corruption cases and increasing the ease of access and benefits, in a context where weak resources and political sensitivity often lead national agencies to avoid corruption cases.
By using informal relationships to build trust and confidence, particularly between agencies from more- and less-developed countries, which facilitates not only cooperation on particular operations but also the transfer of knowledge, practices and strategic thinking around prosecution strategies.
Broader implications
Transnational networks to fight grand corruption are evolving, from purely facilitating operational exchange to providing a range of functions that build capacity, set standards and integrate knowledge. This is made possible by creating contexts in which informal relationships can form and grow (although it is also clear that the formal intelligence-sharing alliance of the Five Eyes provides an important basis for trust in the IACCC). These types of relationship ensure that cooperation goes beyond sharing intelligence, to develop broader and more strategic knowledge around the globe about how to design and tailor investigations, including where to focus, how much resource to use, how to sequence different steps, and when to convert informal conversations into formal requests.
Thus, whereas early work on transnational policing had argued that effective police cooperation requires formal structures and a supranational system of accountability to ensure popular legitimacy, the IACCC experience suggests that softer and more informal forms of cooperation can complement formal cooperation, and even overcome some of the obstacles it faces.
Overall, the system contributes to collective global capacity to fight grand corruption by allowing agencies with weak resources and working in difficult political contexts, to “outsource” some of their need for technical knowhow and capacity to external actors that are not under direct political control and/or are less vulnerable to political intimidation from vested interests. In short, transnational networks operating in the sensitive area of corruption empower actors in high-corruption contexts by allowing them to access and borrow support from systems with stronger rule of law.
