Note from Transparency International

November 5, 2017 69 Views No Comment

It has been a historic week in the legal fight against corruption.

On October 27, a French court convicted Teodoro NguemaObiangMangue, vice-president of Equatorial Guinea and son of the president, of embezzlement.

Transparency International has been fighting this case for ten years, since we helped bring about a change in French law to allow civil society to present evidence.

The verdict is a huge victory against impunity, and a signal to corrupt leaders everywhere that they can’t hide their ill-gotten gains abroad. Next, we’ll be fighting to ensure that Obiang’s confiscated assets go back to their rightful owners: the people of Equatorial Guinea.

We had another important legal victory in a case brought by Transparency International Hungary. The country’s highest court ruled that special donations given to sports clubs in lieu of corporate tax counted as public money – and should therefore be open to public scrutiny.

US$1 billion has gone missing from the state treasury since the programme began in 2011. The biggest winner?Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s own hometown football club.

Meanwhile in Italy, a whistleblower’s courage led to the conviction of the former President of Ferrovie Nord Milano (FNM), the second largest railway company in Italy.

He was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison for embezzlement and fraud after the court found that he had taken company money for personal use.

We’ve been involved in the case as a civil party, and the ruling sets an important precedent: companies that receive public money should be subject to same anti-corruption rules as public administrations.

Speaking of whistleblowing, the European Parliament voted for the European Commission to propose EU-wide whistleblower protection legislation – something for which we’ve been advocating for years.

Earlier in the month of October we were painfully reminded of the risks many brave journalists take when reporting on corruption and denouncing the powerful.

Three weeks ago we wrote on Universal Access to Information Day about the vital but often dangerous role journalists play in the fight against corruption.

In Malta we were shown how high the stakes are when another investigative journalist was murdered for her work bringing corruption to light.

We brought together a group of 17 civil society and investigative journalism groups to demand the authorities in Malta bring the perpetrators of this crime to justice. We’re also calling on the UN to take greater steps to project investigative journalists – and you can too.

Only when corruption is uncovered can action be taken to hold criminals to account. Those who expose corruption must be protected, not intimidated, incarcerated or murdered.

This is an edited version of the weekly updates from Transparency International

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