Firstly, thank you to the AFP for hosting this important training and for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today.

Manly is situated on the land of the Gayemagal people and I’d like to pay my respects to them as the traditional owners of this land.

The Gayemagal first lived in the Manly area thousands of years ago, and thrived due to the abundance of food resources like fish, shellfish and animals.

So I have the proud pleasure of leading Transparency International Australia – the Australian arm of the world’s leading and most successful anti-corruption movement.

As TI Australia we coordinate global mining programme with over 20 chapters around the world combatting corruption in the mining sector, we focus on reducing the risks of corruption in the licensing phase, the most corruption prone part of the value chain.

One in five foreign bribery cases is in the extractive sector.

We also work to engage Chinese mining companies and look to prevent corruption in the energy transition.

Regionally, we train professions through the Asia Pacific Integrity school and combat corruption in infrastructure.

In Australia, we aim to get money out of politics, stop dirty money coming to Australia and combat foreign bribery. There are also very strong TI chapters in the US, UK, New Zealand and Canada.

We define corruption as the abuse of entrusted power for personal gain.

We also corruption also foreign policy and national security issue where foreign actors use corruption to destabilise a country or region.

We’re seeing that across the Pacific, including in the Solomon Islands and more recently with foreign interference in New Caledonia.

For Transparency International, foreign bribery is one of the most direct and damaging forms of corruption worldwide.

It is a threat to democracy and the rule of law, misdirects public resources and it’s a major obstacle to economic development in poorer countries. It distorts cross-border investment, deters competition in international trade and discriminates against SMEs.

But it also has real human impact.

And today, whilst I’m speaking to you as the CEO of TI Australia but also the father of two young children.

And many of you are parents, grandparents, uncles and aunties, I am sure that you know the importance of protecting our children.

So this example shows how foreign bribery can harm children and families.

In Uganda, social welfare officers and court officials used their positions of power to accept bribes from an Ohio-based adoption agency in exchange for recommending that a child be placed into an orphanage, for steering adoption cases to “adoption-friendly” judges, and for obtaining favourable guardianship orders.

In this case it was a bribery scheme that sought to facilitate the trafficking of more than 30 Ugandan girls and boys.

The underlying facts shows that Ms. Parris and Ms. Mirembe paid bribes to Ugandan foreign officials to corruptly secure the adoption of Ugandan children by United States families.

This including the adoption of children who were not orphans and had to be returned to their birth parents.

Specifically, Parris and Mirembe paid bribes to:

1. social welfare officers to secure reports recommending that certain children be placed into orphanages without confirming they were, in fact, were orphaned;
2. Ugandan magistrate judges to obtain court orders placing those children in orphanages;
3. court registers to assign the cases of these children to two corrupt “adoption-friendly” judges; and
4. corrupt Ugandan judges to obtain orders to permit their clients to bring the children to the US for adoption.

To quote Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian C. Rabbitt of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

“The defendants allegedly resorted to bribery and fraud to engage in an international criminal adoption scheme that took children from their home countries in Uganda and Poland without properly determining whether they were actually orphaned. The defendants sought to profit from their alleged criminal activity at the expense of families and vulnerable children,”

In this horrific example, everyone lost.

Children who were taken away from loved ones. The parents in Uganda and Poland who had their children removed,

And the poor mums and dads in America who thought they were given the gift of life only to have it ripped from them again.

This is just one example of the human impacts of foreign bribery and why the role that you play is vital pillar in the fights against corruption which enables other forms of crime.

Another example is drug trafficking in Mexico. Where a Mexican State Attorney General used his position to accept bribes from the H-2 drug cartel in exchange for helping the cartel in a scheme to distribute thousands of kgs of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamine throughout US

Or New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez who stands accused of using his position on the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee to help Egypt secure US military aid in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cheques, cash, and even gold bars,

In Indonesia, a senior environment official used his position to accept bribes from a Missouri-based agricultural company in exchange for undermining a requirement under Indonesian law that an environmental impact study be conducted before the sale of genetically modified crops—of which the company was a leading producer—could be approved.[1]

The second large example I want to share is the Tuna Bond Scandal, in which a New Zealander Andrew Pearse was a key player.

He worked for Credit Suisse. And in 2013 he and others (including senior politicians and Mozambique public servants) conspired to organise a US $2 billion loan to Mozambique.

This amounted to 12% of GDP in a country where 6 in 10 people live below the poverty line of US $1.90 per day.

None of the borrowed money, except bribes, went to Mozambique and there were no services from it.  It was a total fraud.

It resulted in a removal of external international donations, triggered a fiscal crisis that forced the government to severely reduce public spending – to half of what it had been.

Inflation surged. Spending on health and education fell by USD 1.7 billion – entirely due to the debt.

The catastrophic impact on the Mozambique economy will last for years. All facilitated by well-heeled corrupt western crooks.

Foreign bribery, especially on this scale, has a pernicious and devastating effect on the countries where the bribes are paid – the so-called ‘demand side’ of the bribery equation. Governments pay higher prices for lower quality or incomplete goods and services.

It may even waste millions on completely unnecessary procurements. Essential services like education and healthcare are deprived of much needed funds as a result.

Especially in poorer countries, the impact can be a matter of life and death

For those living in countries where companies or individuals are engaged in foreign bribery, or facilitating the laundering of the proceeds of corruption are based. It undermines the integrity of the private sector as well as of the financial system.

It’s clear foreign bribery impacts people who are already vulnerable – children, women reliant of health care, drug users.

Which bring me to the challenge of enforcement.

As TI’s Exporting Corruption Report (2022) shows almost 25 years after the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention was adopted, most countries still have a long way to go in meeting their obligations. In fact, active enforcement is on a downward trend including in some countries that were previously active enforcers.

For example, only two countries – US and Switzerland – are active enforces down from four countries in 2020.

Australia and UK rate as moderate, and Canada and New Zealand as Limited.

So no country is immune to exporting foreign bribery. Nearly every country has companies, employees, agents, intermediaries and facilitators involved in foreign bribery or related money laundering.

Why is this case?

Firstly, a lack of public information on beneficial ownership hinders enforcement.

Secondly, weaknesses in legal frameworks and enforcement systems persist: Weak or non-existent whistleblower protections, low sanctions, insufficient resources and limited independence of enforcement officials.

Further, international cooperation is increasing, but significant obstacles such as incompatible legal frameworks, limited resources or expertise, jurisdictional competition and long delays remain

Most countries fail to publish adequate enforcement information such as national statistics, court judgement or non-trial resolutions.

Victims’ compensation is rare but there are a few positive developments. Mostly where foreign bribery is enforced confiscated profits go to treasury, with some exceptions.

But against this dark backdrop there are rays of sunshine.

Positive developments

If we look at the “demand side” of foreign bribery, a survey by the OECD revealed that in 80 percent of demand-side bribery cases studied, the bribe-demand or -accepting foreign officials involved were never criminally sanctioned by their home governments.

Which is why last year’s development in the US is so important.

In December the United States adopted the Foreign Extortion Prevention Act (FEPA).

FEPA makes it a crime for any foreign official which is defined as:

• any (1) employee of a foreign government,
• (2) immediate family member or close associate of any current or former senior official of a foreign government, or
• (3) employee of a public international organization (e.g., the UN)) to ask for, or to accept, a bribe from any company that is listed on a US stock exchange, from any American or any American company, or while that official is in the US

Transparency International chapters in other countries will now begin advocacy to have similar laws in their jurisdictions.

Closer to home, the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Combatting Foreign Bribery) Act 2024 passed in February 2024.

This long overdue law creates a new failure to prevent offence and significant reforms to substantive offences which will should make it easier for law enforcement to investigate and bring about successful prosecutions.

Sadly, it does not include a deferred prosecution agreement, nor does it prohibit facilitation payments.

But it does do the following:

One, it extends the foreign bribery offence to include the bribery of candidates for public office and bribery conducted to obtain a personal advantage.

Two, it removes the requirement that a benefit or business advantage be ‘not legitimately due’ and replace it with the concept of ‘improperly influencing’ a foreign public official.

Three, it removes the requirement that the foreign public official be influenced in the exercise of their official duties.

And clarifies that the offence does not require the prosecution to prove that the accused had a specific business, or business or personal advantage, in mind, and that the business, or business or personal advantage, can be obtained for someone else.

And four, it creates an offence of failure of a body corporate to prevent foreign bribery by an associate. This is a game changer.

Importantly a corporation will not be liable under the ‘failure to prevent’ offence if it can prove it had ‘adequate procedures’ in place designed to prevent its associates from committing foreign bribery.

So in summary, foreign bribery is the most damaging and direct form of corruption.

It impacts all of us. Our economy, democracy, environment.

But ultimately has a human impact.

And with enforcement being a global challenge, the work that you do is so important in the fight against crime and corruption.

On behalf of Transparency International Australia, I’d like to thank you for being on the front line of fighting corruption and I hope you gain new tools, networks and become a better investigator as a result of this impressive training.

Thank you.