Glossary of corruption-related terms Do you know your baksheesh from your bribery? Your cronyism from your collusion? Read our evolving glossary of terms relating to corruption to find out what they all mean. Sources:U4 Anti-Corruption Resource CentreTransparency International A A LOOTA CONTINUA ABUSE OF POWER / OFFICE / RESOURCES / FUNCTION ACCESS TO INFORMATION ACCOUNTABILITY Read more >
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By Ilya ShumanovFirst published on The Wilson Center Russia’s recognising the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic, followed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, became a formal pretext for the collective West to impose restrictions on Russia in support of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. The negative consequences of such a scenario had been discussed Read more >
Issued by Transparency International Corruption fuels conflict and insecurity globally, and we are now seeing its effects acutely in the case of Russia and Ukraine. Leading democracies have facilitated this conflict by allowing kleptocrats to further their interests and power across the West. Just last week, Transparency International reported on a German state foundation secretly Read more >
By Kwazi Dlamini A unique set of events played out in two Free State courts last week, with one local municipality right at the centre of it. The chief financial officer (CFO) of Nketoana Municipality, Xolani Malindi, made his first court appearance on 8 December, facing fraud charges, while former CFO Vincent Mkhefa was on Read more >
With so many lucrative avenues for criminals to choose from nowadays, the fact that international wildlife crime (IWT) and the smuggling of wildlife products continues to increase is a measure of the vast sums of money to be made from this illegal practice. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), for example, which it spelled out in its 2020 World Wildlife Crime Report, “the Read more >
Image: Wilson Lau, TRAFFIC A humble marine mollusc, Haliotis midae, has been the inadvertent cause of one of South Africa’s biggest poaching/smuggling challenges. The largest abalone in South Africa, it is known locally as perlemoen, from the Dutch meaning ‘mother of pearl’. Occurring naturally along the South African coastline, perlemoen is nothing more than a Read more >
A new study titled Convergence of wildlife crime with other forms of organised crime, released in May 2021 by the Wildlife Justice Commission (WJC), sheds light on this phenomenon of crime convergence, which has been noticed more and more over the last two decades. The report shows that criminal networks are dealing in wildlife Read more >
Image: Michael Kuhlmann for UNCTAD Over one trillion dollars. That’s the amount of money that Africa is estimated to have lost in illicit financial flows (IFFs) over the past 50 years (Kar and Cartwright-Smith, 2010; Africa Growth Initiative, 2020). The current estimate is an annual amount of around $50-billion, and possibly more – a significant Read more >
By Janine Erasmus Fifty years ago the concept might have been taken from a science fiction plot. Now it’s one of the new technologies that become more sophisticated as time passes. Using artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms to track down suspicious activity is a reality – but can we trust them to reveal illicit financial Read more >
