write an essay on bribery and corruption

How to Stop Corruption Essay: Guide & Topics [+4 Samples]

Corruption is an abuse of power that was entrusted to a person or group of people for personal gain. It can appear in various settings and affect different social classes, leading to unemployment and other economic issues. This is why writing an essay on corruption can become a challenge.

One “how to stop corruption” essay will require plenty of time and effort, as the topic is too broad. That’s why our experts have prepared this guide. It can help you with research and make the overall writing process easier. Besides, you will find free essays on corruption with outlines.

• ✍️ How to Write an Essay
• 💰 Essay Examples
• 🤑 How to Stop Corruption Essay
• 💲 Topics for Essay

✍️ How to Write an Essay on Corruption

Before writing on the issue, you have to understand a few things. First , corruption can take different forms, such as:

• Bribery – receiving money or other valuable items in exchange for using power or influence in an illegal way.
• Graft – using power or authority for personal goals.
• Extortion – threats or violence for the person’s advantage.
• Kickback – paying commission to a bribe-taker for some service.
• Cronyism – assigning unqualified friends or relatives to job positions.
• Embezzlement – stealing the government’s money.

Second , you should carefully think about the effects of corruption on the country. It seriously undermines democracy and the good name of political institutions. Its economic, political, and social impact is hard to estimate.

Let’s focus on writing about corruption. What are the features of your future paper? What elements should you include in your writing?

Below, we will show you the general essay on corruption sample and explain each part’s importance:

You already chose the paper topic. What’s next? Create an outline for your future writing. You’re better to compose a plan for your paper so that it won’t suffer from logic errors and discrepancies. Besides, you may be required to add your outline to your paper and compose a corruption essay with headings.

At this step, you sketch out the skeleton:

• what to write in the introduction;
• what points to discuss in the body section;
• what to put into the conclusion.

Take the notes during your research to use them later. They will help you to put your arguments in a logical order and show what points you can use in the essay.

For a long-form essay, we suggest you divide it into parts. Title each one and use headings to facilitate the reading process.

🔴 Introduction

The next step is to develop a corruption essay’s introduction. Here, you should give your readers a preview of what’s coming and state your position.

• Start with a catchy hook.
• Give a brief description of the problem context.
• Provide a thesis statement.

You can always update and change it when finishing the paper.

🔴 Body Paragraphs

In the body section, you will provide the central points and supporting evidence. When discussing the effects of this problem in your corruption essay, do not forget to include statistics and other significant data.

Every paragraph should include a topic sentence, explanation, and supporting evidence. To make them fit together, use analysis and critical thinking.

Use interesting facts and compelling arguments to earn your audience’s attention. It may drift while reading an essay about corruption, so don’t let it happen.

🔴 Quotations

Quotes are the essential elements of any paper. They support your claims and add credibility to your writing. Such items are exceptionally crucial for an essay on corruption as the issue can be controversial, so you may want to back up your arguments.

• You may incorporate direct quotes in your text. In this case, remember to use quotation marks and mark the page number for yourself. Don’t exceed the 30 words limit. Add the information about the source in the reference list.
• You may decide to use a whole paragraph from your source as supporting evidence. Then, quote indirectly—paraphrase, summarize, or synthesize the argument of interest. You still have to add relevant information to your reference list, though.

Check your professor’s guidelines regarding the preferred citation style.

🔴 Conclusion

In your corruption essay conclusion, you should restate the thesis and summarize your findings. You can also provide recommendations for future research on the topic. Keep it clear and short—it can be one paragraph long.

Don’t forget your references!

Include a list of all sources you used to write this paper. Read the citation guideline of your institution to do it correctly. By the way, some citation tools allow creating a reference list in pdf or Word formats.

💰 Corruption Essay Examples

If you strive to write a good how to stop a corruption essay, you should check a few relevant examples. They will show you the power of a proper outline and headings. Besides, you’ll see how to formulate your arguments and cite sources.

✔️ Essay on Corruption: 250 Words

If you were assigned a short paper of 250 words and have no idea where to start, you can check the example written by our academic experts. As you can see below, it is written in easy words. You can use simple English to explain to your readers the “black money” phenomenon.

Another point you should keep in mind when checking our short essay on corruption is that the structure remains the same. Despite the low word count, it has an introductory paragraph with a thesis statement, body section, and a conclusion.

Now, take a look at our corruption essay sample and inspire!

✔️ Essay on Corruption: 500 Words

Cause and effect essay is among the most common paper types for students. In case you’re composing this kind of paper, you should research the reasons for corruption. You can investigate factors that led to this phenomenon in a particular country.

Use the data from the official sources, for example, Transparency International . There is plenty of evidence for your thesis statement on corruption and points you will include in the body section. Also, you can use headlines to separate one cause from another. Doing so will help your readers to browse through the text easily.

Check our essay on corruption below to see how our experts utilize headlines.

🤑 How to Stop Corruption: Essay Prompts

Corruption is a complex issue that undermines the foundations of justice, fairness, and equality. If you want to address this problem, you can write a “How to Stop Corruption” essay using any of the following topic ideas.

The writing prompts below will provide valuable insights into this destructive phenomenon. Use them to analyze the root causes critically and propose effective solutions.

How to Prevent Corruption Essay Prompt

In this essay, you can discuss various strategies and measures to tackle corruption in society. Explore the impact of corruption on social, political, and economic systems and review possible solutions. Your paper can also highlight the importance of ethical leadership and transparent governance in curbing corruption.

Here are some more ideas to include:

• The role of education and public awareness in preventing corruption. In this essay, you can explain the importance of teaching ethical values and raising awareness about the adverse effects of corruption. It would be great to illustrate your essay with examples of successful anti-corruption campaigns and programs.
• How to implement strong anti-corruption laws and regulations. Your essay could discuss the steps governments should take in this regard, such as creating comprehensive legislation and independent anti-corruption agencies. Also, clarify how international cooperation can help combat corruption.
• Ways of promoting transparency in government and business operations. Do you agree that open data policies, whistleblower protection laws, independent oversight agencies, and transparent financial reporting are effective methods of ensuring transparency? What other strategies can you propose? Answer the questions in your essay.

How to Stop Corruption as a Student Essay Prompt

An essay on how to stop corruption as a student can focus on the role of young people in preventing corruption in their communities and society at large. Describe what students can do to raise awareness, promote ethical behavior, and advocate for transparency and accountability. The essay can also explore how instilling values of integrity and honesty among young people can help combat corruption.

Here’s what else you can talk about:

• How to encourage ethical behavior and integrity among students. Explain why it’s essential for teachers to be models of ethical behavior and create a culture of honesty and accountability in schools. Besides, discuss the role of parents and community members in reinforcing students’ moral values.
• Importance of participating in anti-corruption initiatives and campaigns from a young age. Your paper could study how participation in anti-corruption initiatives fosters young people’s sense of civic responsibility. Can youth engagement promote transparency and accountability?
• Ways of promoting accountability within educational institutions. What methods of fostering accountability are the most effective? Your essay might evaluate the efficacy of promoting direct communication, establishing a clear code of conduct, creating effective oversight mechanisms, holding all members of the educational process responsible for their actions, and other methods.

How to Stop Corruption in India Essay Prompt

In this essay, you can discuss the pervasive nature of corruption in various sectors of Indian society and its detrimental effects on the country’s development. Explore strategies and measures that can be implemented to address and prevent corruption, as well as the role of government, civil society, and citizens in combating this issue.

Your essay may also include the following:

• Analysis of the causes and consequences of corruption in India. You may discuss the bureaucratic red tape, weak enforcement mechanisms, and other causes. How do they affect the country’s development?
• Examination of the effectiveness of existing anti-corruption laws and measures. What are the existing anti-corruption laws and measures in India? Are they effective? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
• Discussion of potential solutions and reforms to curb corruption. Propose practical solutions and reforms that can potentially stop corruption. Also, explain the importance of political will and international cooperation to implement reforms effectively.

Government Corruption Essay Prompt

A government corruption essay can discuss the prevalence of corruption within government institutions and its impact on the state’s functioning. You can explore various forms of corruption, such as bribery, embezzlement, and nepotism. Additionally, discuss their effects on public services, economic development, and social justice.

Here are some more ideas you can cover in your essay:

• The causes and manifestations of government corruption. Analyze political patronage, weak accountability systems, and other factors that stimulate corruption. Additionally, include real-life examples that showcase the manifestations of government corruption in your essay.
• The impact of corruption on public trust and governance. Corruption undermines people’s trust and increases social inequalities. In your paper, we suggest evaluating its long-term impact on countries’ development and social cohesion.
• Strategies and reforms to combat government corruption. Here, you can present and examine the best strategies and reforms to fight corruption in government. Also, consider the role of international organizations and media in advocating for anti-corruption initiatives.

How to Stop Police Corruption Essay Prompt

In this essay, you can explore strategies and reforms to address corruption within law enforcement agencies. Start by investigating the root causes of police corruption and its impact on public safety and trust. Then, propose effective measures to combat it.

Here’s what else you can discuss in your essay:

• The factors contributing to police corruption, such as lack of accountability and oversight. Your paper could research various factors that cause police corruption. Is it possible to mitigate their effect?
• The consequences of police corruption for community relations and public safety. Police corruption has a disastrous effect on public safety and community trust. Your essay can use real-life examples to show how corruption practices in law enforcement undermine their legitimacy and fuel social unrest.
• Potential solutions, such as improved training, transparency, and accountability measures. Can these measures solve the police corruption issue? What other strategies can be implemented to combat the problem? Consider these questions in your essay.

💲 40 Best Topics for Corruption Essay

Another key to a successful essay on corruption is choosing an intriguing topic. There are plenty of ideas to use in your paper. And here are some topic suggestions for your writing:

• What is corruption? An essay should tell the readers about the essentials of this phenomenon. Elaborate on the factors that impact its growth or reduce.
• How to fight corruption ? Your essay can provide ideas on how to reduce the effects of this problem. If you write an argumentative paper, state your arguments, and give supporting evidence. For example, you can research the countries with the lowest corruption index and how they fight with it.
• I say “no” to corruption . This can be an excellent topic for your narrative essay. Describe a situation from your life when you’re faced with this type of wrongdoing.
• Corruption in our country. An essay can be dedicated, for example, to corruption in India or Pakistan. Learn more about its causes and how different countries fight with it.
• Graft and corruption. We already mentioned the definition of graft. Explore various examples of grafts, e.g., using the personal influence of politicians to pressure public service journalists . Provide your vision of the causes of corruption. The essay should include strong evidence.
• Corruption in society. Investigate how the tolerance to “black money” crimes impact economics in developing countries .
• How can we stop corruption ? In your essay, provide suggestions on how society can prevent this problem. What efficient ways can you propose?
• The reasons that lead to the corruption of the police . Assess how bribery impacts the crime rate. You can use a case of Al Capone as supporting evidence.
• Literature and corruption. Choose a literary masterpiece and analyze how the author addresses the theme of crime. You can check a sample paper on Pushkin’s “ The Queen of Spades ”
• How does power affect politicians ? In your essay on corruption and its causes, provide your observations on ideas about why people who hold power allow the grafts.
• Systemic corruption in China . China has one of the strictest laws on this issue. However, crime still exists. Research this topic and provide your observations on the reasons.
• The success of Asian Tigers . Explore how the four countries reduced corruption crime rates. What is the secret of their success? What can we learn from them?
• Lee Kuan Yew and his fight against corruption. Research how Singapore’s legislation influenced the elimination of this crime.
• Corruption in education. Examine the types in higher education institutions. Why does corruption occur?
• Gifts and bribes . You may choose to analyze the ethical side of gifts in business. Can it be a bribe? In what cases?
• Cronyism and nepotism in business . Examine these forms of corruption as a part of Chinese culture.
• Kickbacks and bribery. How do these two terms are related, and what are the ways to prevent them?
• Corporate fraud. Examine the bribery, payoffs, and kickbacks as a phenomenon in the business world. Point out the similarities and differences.
• Anti-bribery compliance in corporations. Explore how transnational companies fight with the misuse of funds by contractors from developing countries.
• The ethical side of payoffs. How can payoffs harm someone’s reputation? Provide your point of view of why this type of corporate fraud is unethical.
• The reasons for corruption of public officials .
• Role of auditors in the fight against fraud and corruption.
• The outcomes of corruption in public administration .
• How to eliminate corruption in the field of criminal justice .
• Is there a connection between corruption and drug abuse ?
• The harm corruption does to the economic development of countries .
• The role of anti-bribery laws in fighting financial crimes.
• Populist party brawl against corruption and graft.
• An example of incorrigible corruption in business: Enron scandal .
• The effective ways to prevent corruption .
• The catastrophic consequences of corruption in healthcare .
• How regular auditing can prevent embezzlement and financial manipulation.
• Correlation between poverty and corruption .
• Unethical behavior and corruption in football business.
• Corruption in oil business: British Petroleum case.
• Are corruption and bribery socially acceptable in Central Asian states?
• What measures should a company take to prevent bribery among its employees?
• Ways to eliminate and prevent cases of police corruption .
• Gift-giving traditions and corruption in the world’s culture.
• Breaking business obligations : embezzlement and fraud.

These invaluable tips will help you to get through any kind of essay. You are welcome to use these ideas and writing tips whenever you need to write this type of academic paper. Share the guide with those who may need it for their essay on corruption.

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🔗 References

• Public Corruption: FBI, U.S. Department of Justice
• Anti-Corruption and Transparency: Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
• United Nations Convention against Corruption: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
• Corruption Essay: Cram
• How to Construct an Essay: Josh May
• Essay Writing: University College Birmingham
• Structuring the Essay: Research & Learning Online
• Insights from U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre: Medium
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Essay on Corruption: 100 Words, 200 Words

• Updated on  
• Apr 3, 2024

Corruption is an act of bribery that involves taking gifts and favours in exchange for some gain in terms of services and acceptance. In easy words, corruption means the misuse of power and any positions for personal and financial gain. Whether it’s a public official accepting bribes, a company engaging in fraudulent practices, or a student cheating on an exam, corruption takes various forms. This blog sheds light on the term corruption and the effects of corruption and lists down essay on corruption in 100 and 200 words. 

Table of Contents

• 1 What is corruption?
• 2 Effects on Corruption
• 3 Essay On Corruption in 100 Words
• 4 Essay On Corruption in 200 Words

Also Read: How to Write an Essay in English

Also Read: Speech on Republic Day for Class 12th

What is corruption?

Corruption in simple words means betraying the people and misusing the nominal power that is assigned to any individual. It is the misuse of public property or money for selfish reasons. It is only related to Government or public funds. Every country and every company, whether Public or private, faces some corruption in one form or the other. Corruption deteriorates the mind and thought process of the people of the country. Every developing nation faces corruption as its enemy. It gives rise to inequality, injustice, illegality, and inconsistency at all levels of the administration. Corruption can be in the form of money, gift, etc. In any form, the person taking bribe is equally guilty.

Effects on Corruption

Here are some effects of corruption on individuals and society:

• When people in power are corrupt, people lose trust in them. People start doubting their decisions and intentions for everyone. People can also revolt against them and take any action.
• Corruption can make life unfair. Instead of the most deserving person getting a job or a chance, it might go to someone who paid a bribe. 
• Corruption slows down a country’s progress. Money that should be used to build roads, and schools and also the living conditions get worse. This means the country doesn’t become better and people’s lives stay hard.
• Corruption can block opportunities for many people. If anyone needs a job, education or any healthcare facility and is not able to afford to pay bribes, their opportunities get lost.

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Essay On Corruption in 100 Words

Corruption is when people misuse power for their gain. It’s like cheating the system. Corruption hurts a lot of people. Corruption makes people lose interest and trust in leaders. 

Money meant for schools, hospitals, and roads gets stolen. Jobs might go to those who pay bribes, not the deserving. This may seem unfair to a lot of people. 

Corruption slows down progress and makes life tough. We must stop corruption by being honest and also taking a stand against it. When we fight corruption, we make our world a better place for everyone.

Essay On Corruption in 200 Words

Corruption is a big problem that hurts everyone. It happens when people in power misuse their authority for personal gain. To a lot of people, it may seem unfair. 

The first cause can be that corruption breaks trust. People start doubting if their leaders are working for them personally or for themselves. It also makes them feel upset and also feel disappointed.

Second, corruption wastes money. Money that should help schools, hospitals, and roads ends up in the wrong hands. It means that people who do not get the things that they need for their betterment of life.

Corruption also creates unfairness. People who deserve opportunities might not get them if they can’t pay bribes. It also makes the life of people tough and lose a lot of opportunities. It can also impact the progress of the country and weaken the strong pillars of the country.

To fight corruption, the candidates need to be honest and take steps to stand against it. People can demand transparency and fairness in the country to make the issue sustainable. With the contribution of people, they can create a world where people in power are working for everyone not just for themselves. 

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Related Reads

Some of the adverse effects of corruption in today’s society are lost trust, lost opportunities, and slows down the country’s progress.

The negative emotions related to corruption are anxiety, anger and disappointment.

To write a short essay on corruption, make sure to include the effects of corruption and all the aspects of the term.

Hence, we hope that this blog has assisted you in comprehending what an essay on Corruption must include. If you are struggling with your career choices and need expert guidance, our Leverage Edu mentors are here to guide you at any point of your academic and professional journey thus ensuring that you take informed steps towards your dream career.

Simran Popli

An avid writer and a creative person. With an experience of 1.5 years content writing, Simran has worked with different areas. From medical to working in a marketing agency with different clients to Ed-tech company, the journey has been diverse. Creative, vivacious and patient are the words that describe her personality.

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5 Essays About Corruption

Internationally, there is no legal definition of corruption, but it includes bribery, illegal profit, abuse of power, embezzlement, and more. Corrupt activities are illegal, so they are discreet and done in secrecy. Depending on how deep the corruption goes, there may be many people aware of what’s going on, but they choose to do nothing because they’ve been bribed or they’re afraid of retaliation. Any system can become corrupt. Here are five essays that explore where corruption exists, its effects, and how it can be addressed.

Learn more about anti-corruption in a free course .

Corruption in Global Health: The Open Secret

Dr. Patricia J. Garcia The Lancet (2019)

In this published lecture, Dr. Garcia uses her experience as a researcher, public health worker, and Minister of Health to draw attention to corruption in health systems. She explores the extent of the problem, its origins, and what’s happening in the present day. Additional topics include ideas on how to address the problem and why players like policymakers and researchers need to think about corruption as a disease. Dr. Garcia states that corruption is one of the most significant barriers to global universal health coverage.

Dr. Garcia is the former Minister of Health of Peru and a leader in global health. She also works as a professor and researcher/trainer in global health, STI/HIV, HPV, medical informatics, and reproductive health. She’s the first Peruvian to be appointed as a member to the United States National Academy of Medicine

‘Are women leaders less corrupt? No, but they shake things up”

Stella Dawson Reuters (2012)

This piece takes a closer look at the idea that more women in power will mean less corruption. Reality is more complicated than that. Women are not less vulnerable to corruption in terms of their resistance to greed, but there is a link between more female politicians and less corruption. The reason appears to be that women are simply more likely to achieve more power in democratic, open systems that are less tolerant of corruption. A better gender balance also means more effective problem-solving. This piece goes on to give some examples of lower corruption in systems with more women and the complexities. While this particular essay is old, newer research still supports that more women in power is linked to better ethics and lower corruption levels into systems, though women are not inherently less corrupt.

Stella Dawson left Reuters in 2015, where she worked as a global editor for economics and markets. At the Thomson Reuters Foundation and 100Reporters, she headed a network of reporters focusing on corruption issues. Dawson has been featured as a commentator for BBC, CNB, C-Span, and public radio.

“Transparency isn’t the solution to corruption – here’s why”

David Riverios Garcia One Young World

Many believe that corruption can be solved with transparency, but in this piece, Garcia explains why that isn’t the case. He writes that governments have exploited new technology (like open data platforms and government-monitoring acts) to appear like they care about corruption, but, in Garcia’s words, “transparency means nothing without accountability.” Garcia focuses on corruption in Latin America, including Paraguay where Garcia is originally from. He describes his background as a young anti-corruption activist, what he’s learned, and what he considers the real solution to corruption.

At the time of this essay’s publication, David Riverios Garcia was an Open Young World Ambassador. He ran a large-scale anti-corruption campaign (reAccion Paraguay), stopping corruption among local high school authorities. He’s also worked on poverty relief and education reform. The Ministry of Education recognized him for his achievements and in 2009, he was selected by the US Department of State as one of 10 Paraguayan Youth Ambassadors.

“What the World Could Teach America About Policing”

Yasmeen Serhan The Atlantic (2020)

The American police system has faced significant challenges with public trust for decades. In 2020, those issues have erupted and the country is at a tipping point. Corruption is rampant through the system. What can be done? In this piece, the author gives examples of how other countries have managed reform. These reforms include first dismantling the existing system, then providing better training. Once that system is off the ground, there needs to be oversight. Looking at other places in the world that have successfully made radical changes is essential for real change in the United States.

Atlantic staff writer Yasmeen Serhan is based in London.

“$2.6 Trillion Is Lost to Corruption Every Year — And It Hurts the Poor the Most”

Joe McCarthy Global Citizen (2018)

This short piece is a good introduction to just how significant the effects of corruption are. Schools, hospitals, and other essential services suffer, while the poorest and most vulnerable society carry the heaviest burdens. Because of corruption, these services don’t get the funding they need. Cycles of corruption erode citizens’ trust in systems and powerful government entities. What can be done to end the cycle?

Joe McCarthy is a staff writer for Global Citizen. He writes about global events and environmental issues.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

Essay on Corruption

Students are often asked to write an essay on Corruption in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Corruption

Understanding corruption.

Corruption is a dishonest behavior by a person in power. It can include bribery or embezzlement. It’s bad because it can hurt society and slow down progress.

Types of Corruption

There are many types of corruption. Bribery is when someone pays to get an unfair advantage. Embezzlement is when someone steals money they’re supposed to look after.

Effects of Corruption

Corruption can lead to inequality and injustice. It can make people lose trust in the government and can cause social unrest.

Fighting Corruption

To fight corruption, we need strong laws and honest leaders. Education can also help people understand why corruption is harmful.

Also check:

• 10 Lines on Corruption
• Paragraph on Corruption
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250 Words Essay on Corruption

Introduction.

Corruption, a pervasive and longstanding phenomenon, is a complex issue that undermines social and economic development in all societies. It refers to the misuse of entrusted power for private gain, eroding trust in public institutions and impeding the efficient allocation of resources.

Manifestations and Impacts of Corruption

Corruption manifests in various forms, including bribery, embezzlement, nepotism, and fraud. Its impacts are far-reaching, affecting socio-economic landscapes. Economically, it stifles growth by deterring foreign and domestic investments. Socially, it exacerbates income inequality and hampers the provision of public services.

Anti-Corruption Strategies

Addressing corruption requires a multi-faceted approach. Legislation and law enforcement are critical, but they must be complemented with preventive measures. Transparency, accountability, and good governance practices are key preventive strategies. Technology can also play a significant role, particularly in promoting transparency and reducing opportunities for corrupt practices.

Corruption is a global issue that requires collective action. While governments bear the primary responsibility for curbing corruption, the involvement of civil society, media, and the private sector is indispensable. Thus, the fight against corruption is a shared responsibility, requiring the commitment and efforts of all sectors of society.

500 Words Essay on Corruption

Corruption, an insidious plague with a wide range of corrosive effects on societies, is a multifaceted phenomenon with deep roots in bureaucratic and political institutions. It undermines democracy, hollows out the rule of law, and hampers economic development. This essay explores the concept of corruption, its implications, and potential solutions.

The Nature of Corruption

Corruption is a complex social, political, and economic anomaly that affects all countries. At its simplest, it involves the misuse of public power for private gain. However, it extends beyond this to encompass a wide range of behaviors – from grand corruption involving large sums of money at the highest levels of government, to petty corruption that is prevalent at the grassroots.

Implications of Corruption

Corruption poses a significant threat to sustainable development and democracy. It undermines the government’s ability to provide essential services and erodes public trust in institutions. Furthermore, it exacerbates income inequality, as it allows the wealthy and powerful to manipulate economic and political systems to their advantage.

Corruption also hampers economic development by distorting market mechanisms. It discourages foreign and domestic investments, inflates costs, and breeds inefficiency. Additionally, it can lead to misallocation of resources, as corrupt officials may divert public resources for personal gain.

The Root Causes

The causes of corruption are multifaceted and deeply ingrained in societal structures. They include lack of transparency, accountability, and weak rule of law. Institutional weaknesses, such as inadequate checks and balances, also contribute to corruption. Cultural factors, such as societal acceptance or expectation of corruption, can further perpetuate the problem.

Combating Corruption

Addressing corruption requires a multifaceted approach that targets its root causes. Enhancing transparency and accountability in public administration is crucial. This can be achieved through the use of technology, such as e-governance, which reduces the opportunities for corruption.

Legal reforms are also essential to strengthen the rule of law and ensure that corrupt practices are adequately punished. Additionally, fostering a culture of ethics and integrity in society can help to change attitudes towards corruption.

Furthermore, international cooperation is key in the fight against corruption, particularly in the context of globalized finance. Cross-border corruption issues, such as money laundering, require coordinated international responses.

In conclusion, corruption is a pervasive and complex issue that undermines social, economic, and political progress. Addressing it requires a comprehensive approach that includes institutional reforms, cultural change, and international cooperation. While the fight against corruption is challenging, it is crucial for achieving sustainable development and social justice. By fostering a culture of transparency, accountability, and integrity, societies can effectively combat corruption and build a more equitable future.

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148 Essay Samples and Topics on Corruption

🏆 best corruption title ideas, 👍 good corruption presentation topics, 💡 most interesting research topics on corruption, ❓ research questions on corruption.

• Essay on Corruption, Its Causes, and Effects However, people have used political activities and offices to advance their gains and neglect the need to be accountable and responsible to the public.
• Corruption in Nigeria: How to Solve the Issue This paper will discuss the causes of corruption and the reasons why a strong corruption is viewed in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. A bureaucratic corruption is a form of corruption which is primarily seen […]
• Alienation and Corruption in “The Trial” by Franz Kafka The novel presents the incompatibility of the “divine law” and human law, and the protagonist’s, Joseph K, inability to understand the discrepancy.
• Power and Corruption in Shakespeare’s Plays Macbeth ascends to the throne, he is determined to hold on to the throne, and so he must get rid of Banquo and his family because the witches had predicted that the throne would go […]
• The Film ‘Chinatown’ and Corruption in the American Society One of the ways through film directors can achieve this objective is to focus on the political issues in the society. According to Kavanagh, ‘Chinatown’ is one of the films that highlight the social and […]
• Corruption in the South African Public Sector Studies done have clearly shown that most of the public is fully aware of corruption in South Africa and also that the public is aware of the efforts being made to root out corruption in […]
• Nissan Corporation’s Corruption Scandal Investigation The key objective of this paper is to discuss this case in terms of business ethics and understand the meaning of Ghosn’s behaviors.
• Robert Bolt “A Man for All Seasons”: Corruption Theme The 16th century was a period of political conflict and corruption in England; the theme is presented through the statesman Thomas More who is considered to participate in the struggle between the state and the […]
• How Pushkin Illustrates the Theme of Corruption in the “The Queen of Spades?” Alexander Pushkin in his writing, “The Queen of Spades”, takes the reader through the world of faro gambling at the time of the Imperialist Russia in the beginning of the early 19th century.
• Elite Squad 1&2: The Theme of Corruption The media sugarcoats the drug lords and extorts their reporting of the events in the Rio’s crime and corruption as seen in the film “Elite Squad 2” instead of exposing the truth.
• Corruption in Russia: IKEA’s Expansion to the East The first problem is associated with the improperly designed ad campaign that was perceived as immoral due to the fact that despite the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the local population preserved its mentality related […]
• The Acts of Corruption Committed by the Church The purpose of this paper is to list some of the prevalent acts of corruption committed by the church and its followers and to understand the reasons behind them.
• The Corruption of the Catholic Church in Chaucer’s Works Using the central theme of religious hypocrisy, Chaucer successfully used the Pardoner, the Friar, and the Summoner characters to expose the church representatives’ corruption and evil practices.
• Causes of Corruption in Africa’s Developing Countries Corruption is the leading cause of underdevelopment and challenging economic conditions in Africa’s developing countries. Finally, legal and media institutions lack the freedom to practice justice and expose corruption.
• Corruption Imagery in R.W. Fassbinder’s “Lola” (1981) It is the second in the said trilogy with The Marriage of Maria Braun being the first and Veronika Voss the last.
• How Corruption Violates Fundamental Human Rights of Citizens This essay seeks to establish how corruption leads to breach of fundamental human rights of citizens and determine which rights in particular are mostly risky due to corruption.
• Touch of Evil: The World of Drug Lords and Corruption Janet Leigh, who is considered to be an outstanding American actress of the 50s, perfectly played one of the leading roles in the movie, the role of Susan Vargas.
• Causes of Corruption in a Country One of the major causes of corruption in a country is the poor design of policies and laws that are being implemented by the government.
• The Problem of Corruption in Government In addition to officials, citizens are also partly responsible for the existence of corruption as a daily occurrence, therefore, not only senior staff but also the population may be involved in combating bribery.
• Civil Society Role in Combating Corruption Causes of corruption can be summarized as follows: The lack of political will to combat corruption at the leadership level; The weak judicial system and the absence of the rule of law; The weak parliamentary […]
• The Saudi Aramco Company and Corruption The main idea behind the company’s engagement in a public offering is believed to be driven by the need to make Saudi Arabia’s dependency on oil income through diversification of the economy.
• Corruption and Society: Critical Analysis Because of the latter, the political and social traditions of these societies are built on the beneficial effects of corruption. However, it is a mistake to believe that the social structure of traditional societies will […]
• Political Corruption: Causes, Consequences and Strategies The ethics of the process deals with the methods that public officials apply in the execution of their duties. Political corruption exists in all countries and harms their systems of economic and political governance through […]
• Addressing Corruption in the Engineering Field I chose this topic because corruption is a moral ill in society, especially among engineers and in the recent past it has led to deadly consequences such as the death of people, destruction of the […]
• Witches Against Corruption in Miller’s The Crucible Play Through their portrayal in the play, the accused witches have become powerful symbols of strength and resistance for women who want to take a stand against corruption and injustice.
• Terrorism, Corruption, and Climate Change as Threats Therefore, threats affecting countries around the globe include terrorism, corruption, and climate change that can be mitigated through integrated counter-terror mechanisms, severe punishment for dishonest practices, and creating awareness of safe practices.
• Discussion: Bribery and Corruption Is an Issue That Threatens Sustainability Therefore, multinational enterprises should audit their supply chains to eliminate unsustainable practices such as bribery and the use of child labor and promote socially and environmentally responsible production.
• Determinants of Corruption in Nigeria Therefore, in this research, I am planning to focus on the empirical part of the topic and attempt to make a positive change in society.
• Corruption in Bell, Gilchrist County, Florida The main form of corruption, as evidenced in the video, is embezzlement. The second form of corruption evidenced in the video is graft.
• Corruption in African Region: Causes and Solutions In this regard, the major objectives included investigating the current situation in African organizations, identifying the causes of corruption in African developing countries, studying the impact of neo-patrimonialism on African corruption, and examining unethical business […]
• Corruption in Leading African Companies The research topic is dedicated to the exploration of corporate governance and business ethics within the scope of studying corruption in leading African companies.
• The Key Challenges of Detecting and Prosecuting Corruption in Law Enforcement However, while this is true to some extent, the truth is that the lack of international anti-corruption law, geopolitical considerations, inefficiencies and inherent weaknesses of the Magnitsky Act, opaque banking industries in some countries, and […]
• The Police Culture and Corruption Goal misalignment between the community and police occurred as a result of militarized police starting to view themselves as armies battling on the front lines of war instead as public servants.
• Corruption in Education: Opposition and Refutation Therefore, corruption in the educational sector is not the absolute cause of poor education and increased social problems in the DRC.
• Corruption in Infrastructure of the Democratic Republic of Congo The mining companies are negatively affected by rampant corruption and a culture of everyday transactions, which has resulted in the misappropriation of public funds.
• Corruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo This is a comprehensive report published by the IMF that examines in tremendous detail the corruption, policy, and frameworks of governance and corruption in the DRC.
• Police Corruption: A Crime With Severe Consequences Police corruption is a severe crime that can lead to adverse consequences for the officer-criminals and society. The documentary “Seven Five” shows the story of one of the most criminal police officers Michael Dowd.
• Noble-Cause Corruption Prevention In conclusion, it is difficult to restrict noble-cause corruption, and the only way to affect its outcomes is to promote the right values among police officers.
• Corruption: What Everyone Needs to Know Besides, the poor personnel policy of the state permits the spread of corruption and opportunities for promotion independent of the actual results of the employees’ activity.
• Ethical Issue: Public Corruption The theory of ethical formalism that is represented in the works of Immanuel Kant and John Rawls argues that “the only thing truly good is goodwill, and that what is good is that which conforms […]
• A Moderate Approach of Treating Corruption Propositions The more corruption is entrenched in the government, the more difficult it is for businesses to exist in conditions of local competition with other corrupt officials.
• The Effects of Corruption in Politics on Economics Developed countries report a low level of corruption and tend to be more reliable and financed from the outside. In contrast, the absence of corruption indicates the ensured economic growth and prosperity.
• Corruption During Disaster Relief One of the most notable elements about most of the disasters that have been documented in various parts of the world is lack of adequate preparation in case of their occurrence.
• Public Corruption and Embezzlement For a party to be guilty of an offense, the elements of the guilty mind and the actual commission of the crime must be present.
• Ethical Issues Related to the Internal Corruption In such regard corruption appears to be a considerably controversial ethical issue, as it is closely linked with the aspects of loyalty and trust.
• Corruption in Kuwait: Analysis of Different Aspects of Kuwait’s Corruption Kuwait is a nation that is affected by corruption cases, and it is one of the states in the world that are highly corrupt.
• Agency Interaction and Police Corruption One of the officers told me that I do not need to pay for my food at this restaurant because the owners give it free to the police officers.
• Police Corruption, Misconduct and Brutality: When a Good-Cop-Bad-Cop Routine Goes Wrong The given cases show that, sadly enough, power abuse among the members of the police department is still an issue, and it is probably going to be as long as the means to coordinate the […]
• Noble Cause Corruption – A Crime-Fighting Sub-Culture The term Noble Cause Corruption refers to a crime-fighting sub-culture that involves the law enforcement members being engaged in activities that would otherwise be considered criminal or unethical for the purposes of the greater good […]
• Institutional Corruption: Praise the Lord Club For example, in the case of bribery, the crime is fuelled both by the person who asks for the bribe and the one who pays it out.
• Corruption of Public Officials It has been identified that individuals of the upper class also commit crime by the virtue of the positions that they hold and the trust and power that is vested to them.
• Anti-Corruption Strategies in Kazakhstan On the backdrop of the notion that corruption is an international issue of concern5, the aim of this paper is to evaluate the success of anti corruption strategies in Kazakhstan.
• Public Corruption and Its Impact on the Economy Corruption is in itself a very negative aspect that impedes the economic growth of the affected country, or organization irrespective of the status of development.
• Public Corruption as a Cultural Tradition This means that corruption as a wider topic of concern to most people has its roots in the cultural aspect of socialism and formed a fundamental aspect of the cultural aspect of human life.
• Corruption and Integrity in Modern World The difference in the levels of corruption in these countries is a result of different parameters and at the same time, the effects are diverse.
• Corruption and Ways to Prevent Its Occurrence Power is the authority and ability to control. Emotional intelligence is the capacity and ability to integrate, assess and manage feelings of self or of others.
• Police Corruption in “The Detonator” by Wesley Snipes Judging by the content of high-level corruption within the police as exhibited in the movies, it is only reasonable to say that police have deviated from their traditional role of being the custodians of social […]
• Latin America: Administrative Reforms and Corruption The government agenda incorporated research agenda in 1995 with the shared but conflicting leadership between the presidency of the council of ministers with whom the emphasis was placed on the organizational and management aspects of […]
• Corruption and Integrity: The Analysis of the Corruption System in the World In the territory of the Middle East this country takes the first place in corruption; the analysis of the corruption issues in the country carried out based on recent tragedy happening to Radhi al-Radhi being […]
• African Corruption and Sapolsky’s “A Primate’s Memoir” The preservation of the wildlife is necessary in order to ensure that the animals are protected from being killed hence they do not become extinct as many other animals have furnished due to lack of […]
• Corruption of Government in Church Some people argue that that most of the actions of the church in the course of its development cannot be regarded as corruptive whereas others state that the desire of the church to enrich itself […]
• Relationship Between Lobbying and Corruption Lobbying can be defined as the act of influencing government leaders for the alteration of law or the creation of new legislation that will support the interest of a particular group or organization. The basis […]
• Police Reform in Russia: Evaluation of Police Corruption Which individual, institutional, and organizational factors of corruption did Medvedev’s 2011 police reform target, and how successful was it in eliminating the practice of corruption among law enforcement officers in Russia compared to other states?
• Police Corruption in Russia: Determinants and Future Policy Implications To critically review the present-day situation pertaining to police corruption in Russia To evaluate the effectiveness of measures that Russia currently undertakes to curb police corruption To analyse the main legal, economic, social, and […]
• Corruption, Media and Public. Cocalero Documentary However, for the public to act against such cases, the media has to play its role in spreading nonpartisan information concerning the occurrence of corruption in a given area.
• International Business: Corruption and Bribery in Latin America In the context of this paper, it could be claimed that in Latin America, the frequency of the occurrence of corruption and bribery tends to rise in response to the malfunction of inherent power mechanisms […]
• Corruption in Kenya Evolves for a Digital Age At the same time, it is obvious that the interested parties are quick to catch up with the progress regardless of the legality of their actions.
• Anti-Corruption Efforts in Trading With China Under this law, any person who is found guilty of operating business in a country in an effort to give property or money to customers so as to sell or purchase products is liable to […]
• Noble Cause Corruption in Officer Employees Therefore, I present this memorandum for you to be aware of the principles of ethical behavior, which are obligatory for every officer, and expect your ethically-sound conduct in the future.
• Corruption in New York and Ethical Obligations When discussing the violations of ethical principles in the case of Smith and Halloran, it is essential to mention that the established rules of ethics in political leadership are put in place to prevent classic, […]
• Police Corruption and Citizen’s Ethical Dilemma There are three key stakeholders in the given situation, which are the policemen, who set the terms; the father, who is to take the pivoting decision; and the family, who depends on the decision which […]
• Corruption Shaping Democracies in Latin America This research paper gives a detailed analysis of the nature of this problem and how it affects the welfare of different communities, regions, and citizens.
• Private Prisons’ Ethics and Capital-Driven Corruption The promotion of private prisons in the U.S.context was a response to the identified crisis. Even though there is a slight propensity to justify the idea of private prisons as the tools for containing prisoners […]
• American Police Corruption and Its Classification The invention of camera phones gave everybody the ability to document the wrongful actions of police and have undermined the trust people had in the police authority.
• Noble Cause Corruption and Virtue Ethics The answer lies in the purpose and the implied public image of the police. The role of the policeman is to uphold the law dictated by the government and the constitution of the country.
• Corruption in Arbitration in the United Arab Emirates As such, when conducting a research that focuses on corruption and how to deal with it, it is important to have a clearly guided approach of the study that can help in achieving the desired […]
• Bribery and Corruption in International Arbitration The tendency towards the globalization created the basis for the improved cooperation between states, companies, agencies, individuals, etc.and preconditioned the shift of priorities towards the global discourse as the most promising mean of cooperation.
• Public Corruption as a Phenomenon and Explanations Thus, to describe the phenomenon of public corruption, four major hypotheses exist the concept of “slippery slope,” the society-at-large hypothesis, the structural or affiliation hypothesis, and the rotten apple hypothesis.
• Gift Culture and Corruption in the World The main argument in this kind of claim is that corruption is a critical attribute of many societies that embrace the gift culture practice.
• Theater of Corruption in “Syriana” by Stephen Gaghan The aim of this paper is to explore the overlapping of oil and politics in the context of the movie. In scene 20 when discussing the negotiations of the prince’s brother with American lawyers, Woodman […]
• The Corruption Issue in the Contemporary Society Further, pinpointing the necessary aspects that foster the development of the skill besides assessing the influence of faith and spirituality in the reinforcement of the quality would be the concentration of the paper.
• Global Business: Culture, Corruption, Experiments This paper summarizes the main points of three articles focusing on international business, gives the writer’s respective position and rationale, and provides employer best practices in the specific areas examined.
• Corruption in Charity Organizations However, certain rich people avoid paying taxes by giving lots of money to charities in the form of donations. The main reason why some people donate to charities is so that they can win the […]
• Leadership, Power, Corruption in Today’s Politics The concept of leadership, especially in the political arena is complex and the perception of a good leader differs from one school of thought to another.
• Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: United States vs. John Blondek, et al. Hence, the description of the chain of events that has led to the indictment, as seen by the Judge: “Blondek and Tull were employees of Eagle Bus Company…they paid a $50,000 bribe to Defendants Castle […]
• Corruption in Business Environment For instance, the business environment of China is in the state of transition because of significant changes in political regimes and leaders.
• Corruption and Corporate and Personal Integrity Bribery, embezzlement of funds and illegitimate procurement always impose extra and unjustified costs to the cost of acquiring public services and damages the credibility of those institutions that are involved in the vice.
• Sociology: Is Guanxi Corruption? In China, Guanxi has been in use for a very long time and has been socially accepted as a way of life, both in the day-to-day activities and also in business practices.
• Excessive Business Regulations and Corruption For the purpose of the paper, business regulation is taken to mean the laws and institutions established by governments to govern the establishment of businesses either by local citizens and companies or by foreign investors.
• Corruption and Accountability of Police Work In this regard, lack of strong and proper policies on misconduct and unethical behavior in the line of duty has helped to perpetrate the corruption of law enforcement officers in various sectors of their work.
• Corruption and Ethics in China’s Banking Sector The ranking of China among the most corrupt countries is illustrative of the rampant corruption both in the state and in the private sector. In America, corruption is a civil tort and perpetrators of the […]
• Mexican Political Parties Role in Corruption and Insecurity The top political brass of Mexico is to blame for the misfortunes in the country. This separation led to reduced influence of the church in political activities.
• Political Corruption in the Airline Industry The cartoon relates to this in that the two nationals may have used corrupt means to avoid security checks, and the pilot also had a personal political affiliation which may have caused him to divert […]
• Political Corruption as a Trigger of Democracy Hence, the development of the political systems invites more active voters who contribute to the development of the democratic principles. Therefore, the democratic influence on political power is closely associated with the development of the […]
• Political Corruption: Least and Most Corrupt Countries This has led to not only following of the laws to the latter but also avoiding the labeling of corruption in their work place.
• Ethical Problems in Corruption The notion that in a court of law, it is normally the suspects’ arguments against the amount of evidenced presented before the courts have greatly contributed to noble cause corruption.
• Global Financial Crisis: Corruption and Transparency Due to the large number of the emerging markets, the global financial regulators lacked a proper mechanism to handle the situation.
• The Roles of Vertical and Shared Leadership in the Enactment of Executive Corruption: Implications for Research and Practice Responsibility disposition refers to the tendency of a leader to feel obliged to do the right thing for the welfare of the majority.
• Public Policy on Corruption The rationale of the policy The rationale of this policy is to eliminate corruption. Besides, this model will ensure that there is universality when it comes to the application of these policies.
• What Contributes to the Corruption? Neo-liberalism and corruption One of the major factors that contributed to the apparent rise and spread of corruption and which is a subject of debate is neo-liberalism which started in the 1970s and the 1980s.
• Judicial Corruption in Developing Countries It originates from the judges and lawyers who are at the center of the legal systems in Africa. There is a lingering culture of impunity in African leadership that is the primary cause of corruption.
• Cairo Revolution Against Corruption and Injustice The success of that protest led to the formalization of the movement with a mission to organize and mobilize ordinary people to fight for their rights.
• Corruption and Integrity: The Broad Context of Moral Principles One of the approaches in comparing the most and least corrupt is evaluating the economic positions of the countries. Another significant difference between the most and least corrupt countries is in terms of the effectiveness […]
• Does Corruption Grease or Put Sand in a System’s Cogs? The first advantage is that corruption enables a system to avoid bureaucratic structures that would cause delays in the progress of a system.
• Corruption and Bribery in the Oil Sector in Nigeria and Angola It is identified that the west, through their MNCs, are solely to blame for the rampant cases of corruption in Nigeria and Angola.
• Corruption and Bribery in the Oil Sector of Angola The oil industry in the African continent, particularly in the largest oil producers like Angola and Nigeria is the centre of corruption and there is a need to introduce transparency in the management of oil […]
• Business Corruption in the American and Chinese Culture This paper presents ethical issues focusing on business corruption in the American and Chinese culture. Business corruption practices take place in the American and Chinese civilizations differently.
• Corruption in Russia The rising corruption cases have been related to the 2006 Russian president’s policies that were meant to strengthen the state on the expense of the Russia’s civil society.
• Corruption in Russia: Causes and Consequences In addition, because of the clear connection between corruption and increased crime, security standards have declined in Russia, because of the ever-increasing net of criminal gangs, which evade the long arms of the law, because […]
• Public Policy vs. Social Norms and Corruption Political processes enshrined in democratic values of integrity and accountability must continue to shape the institutional framework in the region. Political and civil institutions in Sierra Leone could stop the escalation of illegal trade to […]
• The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) Due to the fact that the Corruption Perceptions Index reflects the degree of corruption in countries, it can also denote the level of integrity performance.
• Corruption in Law Enforcement Some developments in the state fought the criminality of the state machinery indirectly, such as the endorsement of the civil rights in 1964.
• Law Enforcement: Noble Cause Corruption Since the policeman knows the driver/occupant of the vehicle is a threat to the society, he dramatically puts some illegal drugs on the car which will act as a basis for his/ her arrest.
• Corruption as a Social Phenomenon While all manners of corruption are inherently damaging to the society, this particular form of corruption poses the most significant threat since it is the political bodies in our country that are charged with guiding […]
• Concepts of Corruption as Threat of Security The political officers who are charged with the core obligation of discharging their mandate with the cardinal objective of protecting the interest of the public have gone astray and turned a threat to the welfare […]
• Does Competition Kill Corruption?
• Can Salaries and Re-Election Prevent Political Corruption?
• Does Corruption Affect Health Outcomes in the Philippines?
• Did China’s Anti-corruption Campaign Affect the Risk Premium on Stocks of Global Luxury Goods Firms?
• Does Corruption Affect Income Inequality and Poverty?
• Are Corruption and Taxation Harmful to Growth?
• Does Corruption Affect Suicide?
• Can Corruption Constrain the Size of Governments?
• Does Corruption Affect Total Factor Productivity?
• Are Corruption Levels Accurately Identified?
• Does Corruption Cause Encumber Business Regulations?
• Can Corruption Ever Improve an Economy?
• Does Corruption Discourage International Trade?
• Are Financial Development and Corruption Control Substitutes in Promoting Growth?
• Does Corruption End the Dominant Party System?
• Can Corruption Foster Regulatory Compliance?
• Does Corruption Erode Trust in Government?
• Are the Law, Democracy, and Socioeconomic Factors Related to the Level of Corruption in the Brazilian States?
• Does Corruption Ever Help Entrepreneurship?
• Can Corruption Function as “Protection Money” and “Grease Money”?
• Does Corruption Facilitate Trade for the New EU Members?
• Are There Differences Between Perception of Corruption in Public and Private Sector?
• Does Corruption Foster Growth in Bangladesh?
• Can India Get Rid of Corruption?
• Are Top Managers Responsible When Corruption Is Afoot?
• Can Institutional Reforms Reduce Corruption?
• Are Women More Likely Than Men to Oppose Corruption in China?
• Can Openness Deter Corruption?
• Does Corruption Impede Economic Growth in Pakistan?
• Can the Exchange Rate Regime Influence Corruption?
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16 Corruption and Bribery

Manuel Velasquez, Department of Management, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University

• Published: 02 January 2010
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This article describes the ethical issues that arise when business engages in bribery and corrupt activities. It shows that while corruption and bribery in most developed and developing nations are unethical, there are specific and identifiable cultural contexts within which they may be morally indifferent acts. It explains that even where corruption and bribery are unethical, there are circumstances that can render them morally acceptable and that even where corruption and bribery are morally indifferent acts, there are circumstances that can render particular instances of such acts morally wrong.

According to the World Bank, bribes paid out by businesses and other parties cost them over one trillion dollars a year, more than 3 percent of the total estimated world economy. 1 Businesses are not the only ones that engage in bribery, of course, but businesses have been singled out as one of the main suppliers of the bribes that are paid today to corrupt government officials. 2 Moreover, because arranging, paying, and monitoring bribes is a time‐intensive activity, bribery also imposes heavy nonmonetary costs on businesses. Bribery forces managers to take time away from productively running their enterprises and instead devote their energies to queuing, negotiating, covering up, and ensuring that bribed parties will not renege on the deal or demand additional payments. While companies sometimes calculate that the benefits of paying a particular bribe (for example, to secure a lucrative government contract) will outweigh the costs of the bribe, these calculations often fail to take into account the costs that bribery imposes on other parties. For corruption also imposes significant costs on societies. 3 The bribes that firms pay to conduct business in a given country act much like a tax that drives foreign companies away, thereby lowering the country's overall foreign investment, a consequence of corruption that is particularly damaging to developing nations. Corruption also distorts a country's public expenditures as public monies are diverted away from education, health care, redistribution, and poverty reduction and are invested instead into projects where it is easier to extract bribes from businesses, such as purchasing military hardware and putting together large construction projects. And bribery lowers the quality of public projects since less qualified businesses can use bribes to secure contracts for public projects; they subsequently try to cover the costs of the bribe by using cheaper materials and then bribe inspectors to overlook cheap quality and shoddy construction.

In view of the social and private costs associated with corruption in general and bribery in particular, it is not surprising that these are now viewed as major problems that both businesses and governments need to address. Their importance is recognized by the recent explosion of activity aimed at understanding corruption and bribery and at controlling the extent to which international businesses engage in these. Numerous articles and book‐length studies of the causes and consequences of corruption have been published during the last twenty‐five years that have greatly enhanced our understanding of the social and economic effects of business bribery and of the conditions that engender it. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like Transparency International have been founded to fight corruption and to provide measurements of its extent and costs. While every nation has long had laws prohibiting its businesses from bribing its own government officials, a large number of the world's nations have recently adopted laws that prohibit their businesses from bribing the officials of other nations. The United States, of course, criminalized the bribery of foreign officials by U.S. companies in 1977 when it passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) after investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission discovered that more than 400 U.S. businesses were engaged in bribing foreign officials. In December 1997, the member countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) adopted the “Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions,” which required OECD countries to adopt legislation modeled on the FCPA that would criminalize the bribery of foreign officials by multinational businesses. Other regional groups of countries have adopted similar conventions including the Inter‐American Convention Against Corruption, the African Union's Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption, and the Anti‐Corruption Initiative for Asia and the Pacific. Moreover, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and several other financial institutions have adopted rules that prohibit businesses that pay bribes from participating in any projects they fund. In June 2004, the United Nations adopted Principle 10 of its Global Compact, which calls on businesses to “work against corruption in all its forms.” 4

In spite of the tremendous attention now being paid to corruption and bribery, our growing understanding of their costs, and the numerous legislative attempts governments have made to criminalize corrupt activities, relatively little attention has been paid to the ethical issues raised when businesses engage in corruption and bribery. Both the extensive new literature on corruption and the recent legislative initiatives criminalizing bribery and corruption assume that it is wrong for businesses to engage in the bribery and corruption of government officials. Yet very few attempts have been made to examine this assumption. I propose to take a close look at this key assumption. I will begin by discussing the difficult issue of articulating suitable definitions of corruption and bribery. I discuss first the definition of corruption, which is the broader and more generic term and which raises some difficult issues, and then discuss the definition of bribery, which is a specific kind of corruption and whose definition is somewhat less troublesome. Next, I turn to the ethics of corruption with the aim of critically examining the main arguments put forth to show that corruption is wrong. I will show that although these arguments provide some reason for thinking that corruption is generally wrong, each of the arguments has significant limitations. I will end by looking at what these conclusions imply about how businesses should deal with the issues of corruption and bribery.

My focus throughout is on bribery and corruption as they relate to business and primarily to the issues that arise when businesses offer bribes to government officials or otherwise engage in the corruption of government. Businesses can, of course, offer bribes to parties other than government officials. A business can, for example, bribe another company's purchasing agent in order to induce the agent to buy the products of the business. I will have only a little to say about such business‐to‐business forms of bribery and corruption. I set these forms of bribery and corruption aside because, as I explain in the next section, the form of bribery and corruption that is currently of most concern is the bribery of government officials by businesses. 5 Although much of what I say below will be applicable to the payment of bribes to members of other kinds of (nongovernmental) organizations, such forms of bribery lie outside the focus of this essay.

What Are Corruption and Bribery?

The earliest discussions of corruption, comprising what I will call the “classic” view of corruption, saw corruption primarily as a property of whole institutions, particularly of political institutions. 6 The term “corruption” itself, of course, denotes deterioration or falling away from some ideal or pristine or healthy state, a form of decline, decay, or degeneration. Plato and Aristotle used the term to describe what they characterized as the deterioration of what they believed were ideal political arrangements. Aristotle, for example, wrote that “there are three kinds of government and an equal number of deviations, or, as it were, corruptions of these three kinds.” The three kinds of “right” government are those in which “the one, or the few, or the many govern with an eye to the common good,” while the corrupt forms are those “administered with an eye to the private interest of either the one or the few or the many rulers.” 7

An important feature of the classic conception of corruption is the idea that what constitutes corruption of an institution is defined relative to the ideal state of that institution. In terms of the teleological views that Aristotle and other classical thinkers favored, the ideal state of an entity is defined by its proper end, and since in his view the proper end of government is the achievement of the common good of all, government becomes corrupt when it is turned to achieving the limited interests of a ruler or a ruling group. A second important feature of the classic conception of corruption is the idea that corruption involves the pursuit of personal interests instead of the pursuit of an institution's proper end. As we will see, this feature is one that remains present in those current conceptions of corruption that are extensions of the classic concept.

The idea that political institutions become corrupt when they deviate from achieving a certain ideal end can be extended to many different kinds of institutions. While the classical tradition tended to apply the term “corruption” to political institutions, we today often extend the term to apply also to commercial institutions. A business organization can be said to be corrupt when the organization has deviated from the pursuit of its proper end and is instead improperly put at the service of other private ends. This can happen, for example, when a company's purchasing agents regularly buy only from suppliers who provide kickbacks instead of purchasing the goods that will best meet the company's needs, or when management issues misleading financial statements to owners or shareholders, or when dishonesty, fraud, nepotism, or embezzlement are endemic in the company. The phenomenon of corrupt business institutions is an interesting one, and many of the arguments and claims I will make below can, with appropriate adjustments, be applied to business institutions. But I mention the concept of corrupt business institutions here only to set it aside since it is not where the most important issues lie. The enormous attention that is today being paid to corruption around the globe is concerned not with the corruption of business institutions but with the extent to which businesses, particularly multinational businesses, are corrupting the political institutions of our world. 8 I will here, therefore, focus my discussion on the ethical issues that surround the large and growing number of businesses that seem to be engaged in the corruption of our political institutions.

The Contemporary View of Corruption

Contemporary discussions of corruption differ from the classic view insofar as today we tend to see corruption not primarily as a feature of whole institutions but of individual actions performed by individual persons, including not only those who hold institutional roles but also those who exert influence on those who hold institutional roles through bribes or other means. 9 This modern broader conception of corruption can still be tied to the classic idea that sees corruption as involving the deviation of an institution from the pursuit of its proper ends. The corrupt action can then be characterized either as one in which individuals who hold institutional roles—such as government officials—divert an institution from the pursuit of its own proper end and instead have it serve other personal ends, or as one in which individuals—such as business people—seek to influence those (e.g., government officials) who hold institutional roles so as to cause them to so divert their institution from the pursuit of its proper ends. In this classically based but modernized conception the emphasis is on the act that brings about the corruption of the institution. Still, the classic idea is preserved that a corrupted institution is one that is made to deviate from the pursuit of its proper ends.

The classic view that corruption is a matter of an institution's being made to deviate from serving its own proper end or the act (or act of influence) that brings about such a deviation carries with it two significant problems. First, the view assumes that there is some more or less clearly definable end at which our institutions should aim. But there is, and always has been, disagreement about what the nature and purpose of our most basic institutions should be, not only of our political institutions but also of the institutions of business. Some claim that our political institutions should aim at the “common good”; others see political institutions in terms of a legitimate competition of factions or parties for power and resources; still others, as we will see, look at government as the personal property of an absolute monarch whose ends it appropriately serves. Thus, many British observers condemn as “corruption” the willingness of U.S. legislators to support the interests of campaign donors while most Americans see this as the normal accompaniment of competitive politics; 10 and we today would label as “corruption” the sale of government offices and their use as sources of personal income, pursuits that were common and honorable during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in the absolute monarchies of France, Spain, England, Austria, Prussia and, China. 11 The classically based conception of corruption, then, is subject to significant ambiguity insofar as it appeals to a concept (the end or purpose of government) whose meaning is not fixed.

Second, the classical view tends to break down when it is used to try to identify corruption in an international context, which is where much of the attention now being paid to corruption is focused. Different cultures tend to have very different views about the nature of their basic social institutions and the behaviors that are appropriate for various institutional actors. Writing about Nepali society during the twentieth century, T. Louise Brown notes that

the traditional Nepali Hindu institution of chakari [the bestowal of flattery and gifts upon a patron who is expected to favor the client] was important because it was the basic mechanism through which clientelism and patronage networks operated. And it was through patronage networks that Nepal was governed… What foreigners considered to be corruption was, in the Nepali context, deemed a practical way of making the system work. 12

Because of such differences, what counts as a corrupt deviation in one culture might be viewed as normal and benign in another.

Three Contemporary Definitions of Corruption

These problems have led contemporary social scientists to set aside the classic conception of corruption and to try to construct a definition of corruption that is not afflicted by these ambiguities and difficulties. One such contemporary approach to defining corruption focuses on the idea that corruption is the violation of the formal duties of one's office for the sake of personal gain. The economist Joseph Nye, for example, characterized corruption in political contexts as “behavior which deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of private‐regarding,… pecuniary, or status gains; or violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private‐regarding influence. This includes such behavior as bribery;… nepotism;… and misappropriation.” 13 By “formal duties,” Nye refers to the duties spelled out in the law, in the explicit contract one makes with one's employer organization, or in the unwritten public norms that are believed to govern a public role.

Nye's definition, although widely cited, does not seem to be a significant improvement on the classic conception of corruption. The definition employs several ambiguous concepts including “deviates,” “formal duties,” “private‐regarding,” and “rules.” What, for example, are the formal rules to which Nye's definition appeals? If these are simply codified laws or written contracts, then the definition cannot easily be applied in international contexts since laws and contracts differ significantly from country to country. If these are, instead, unwritten public norms then the definition faces the problem that public views are not monolithic within a given nation, much less between nations of different cultures, and so it will be difficult, at best, to apply this view to international contexts. Nye's definition does not seem, then, to surmount the problems and ambiguities that are attributed to the classic definition.

A second modern approach, and the one that is today prevalent among economists and other social scientists, focuses on the idea that corruption in political contexts is the misuse of something that belongs to the public for private gain. This is, for example, the kind of definition proposed by the United Nations Development Programme, which states that corruption is “the misuse of public power, office, or authority for private benefit—through bribery, extortion, influence peddling, nepotism, fraud, speed money, or embezzlement.” 14 A similar definition is proposed by the economist Susan Rose‐Ackerman who writes, simply, that “corruption is the misuse of public power for private gain.” 15

This second definition also seems to provide but little improvement on the classic definition. The second definition relies on a distinction between the public and private realms. But this distinction is a relatively recent Western invention. 16 Because the distinction between the public and the private is of relatively recent vintage, it is difficult to apply the concept to those earlier periods of history when the distinction did not exist, such as the absolute monarchies of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries I mentioned earlier. It is also difficult to apply the concept to those cultures where the distinction is even today not fully recognized, such as many of the nations of sub‐Saharan Africa. 17 Moreover, this second definition is also subject to other ambiguities. The definition assumes that some uses of public power are “misuses.” But how is one to distinguish legitimate ways of using public power to help a private party (for example, when a police officer protects the victim of a crime), from “misusing” public power for such a purpose? For reasons we have already seen, whether one relies on codified laws or on unwritten norms to determine what constitutes a “misuse,” the definition will be problematic when it is applied in international contexts.

A third approach characterizes corruption in terms of damage to a group, organization, or government. Carl Friedrich, for example, writes,

corruption may therefore be said to exist whenever a power holder who is charged with doing certain things, that is a responsible functionary or office holder, is by monetary or other rewards . . ., induced to take actions which favor whoever provides the reward and thereby damage the group or organization to which the functionary belongs, more specifically the government. 18

Like the earlier two approaches, this third approach does not seem to provide a significant advance over the ambiguities that are said to afflict the classic definition. Friedrich's definition appeals to the concept of “damage” to the group or organization. But he leaves unexplained what constitutes damage to an organization and, more importantly, it is not clear that such damage is inflicted by all acts of corruption. Suppose a businessman secretly bribes a customs official into allowing him to move through customs at a normal rate rather than the delayed rate that the officials impose to solicit bribes. Or suppose a Jew bribes a Nazi official in order to escape death or imprisonment. Both acts, one can argue, are beneficial, not harmful. Corruption, as indicated earlier, can inflict significant costs on society, but not every individual act of corruption does so and, consequently, such harm cannot be taken as a defining characteristic of corruption.

I conclude that the definitions that recently have been proposed to replace the classic concept of corruption do not succeed in overcoming its ambiguities and problems. Indeed, to this day no definition of corruption is universally accepted as unproblematic. 19 It would seem, then, that the classic definition of corruption, in spite of its evident ambiguities and the difficulties it raises when it is applied to cross‐cultural contexts, is as good as any we are going to get. This result points to an important conclusion: the concept of corruption is an inherently ambiguous one whose meaning depends on background cultural assumptions about the nature and purposes of our social institutions. Because these background assumptions vary from one period of time to another and from one culture to another, what is counted as corruption in one time and place will not count as corruption in different times and places. This aspect of corruption, as we will see in the final section of this essay, has important moral implications.

The modern definitions I have examined, however, should not be rejected as useless, for each yields valuable insights and can serve to complement the classic view of corruption, even if they do not eliminate its ambiguities. Nye's idea that corruption involves the violation of the rules that govern institutional roles reminds us that institutional roles and the rules that structure them are designed to achieve institutional ends or purposes, so that violating such rules forces the institution to deviate from its proper ends. The definition of corruption as the misuse of public power for private gain can be viewed as a modern version of the classic claim that the purpose of political institutions is to serve the interests of all, so that corruption ensues when they are made to serve the private interests of “one or the few.” And Friedrich's attempt to define corruption in terms of the damage it causes is a useful reminder that although corruption is not definable by such harm, nevertheless corruption generally imposes significant costs on society.

I will return to these modern definitions when, below, I turn to discussing the ethical aspects of corruption and bribery. As we will see, these definitions are also valuable insofar as each suggests a distinct kind of argument in support of the view that corruption and bribery are unethical. Now, however, I must turn to examining how bribery can best be defined.

Bribery is a species of corruption. Besides bribery, corruption includes a wide range of deviant institutional behaviors such as nepotism, favoritism, fraud, embezzlement, extortion, and buying votes. Bribery, however, is the paradigm case of corruption. 20 It is also the form of corruption on which virtually all the recent anticorruption legislative initiatives I discussed above have focused, and so it is the species of corruption that is today considered the most important. But what exactly is bribery?

Some recent attempts to define “bribery” are clearly mistaken. Consider, for example, the definition proposed by James: “A bribe is a payment, made by a third party to an agent of a principal, in which the agent explicitly or implicitly agrees to take an action that is contrary to his duty as an agent of the principal and is thus not in the interest of the principal.” 21 This definition is too narrow. Consider, first, that there are some bribes that are not paid to “an agent of a principal.” For example, an athlete, as I noted earlier, can be bribed to lose a contest when the athlete is not an “agent of a principal.” Instead, the athlete is bribed into doing something that he is required not to do as a participant in the sport. Second, the person who is bribed might not be bribed to “take an action that is contrary to his duty as an agent of the principal.” For example, a customs official who refuses to clear some goods through customs that he should clear might be bribed into clearing those goods as he should. In such a case the official is not being bribed to “agree to take an action that is contrary to his duty as an agent of the principal.” On the contrary, the purpose of the bribe is to get the official to comply with his duty. Similar problems of narrowness afflict the proposal of Danley, who states that bribery is “offering or giving something of value with a corrupt intent to induce or influence an action of someone in a public or official capacity.” 22 Danley assumes that only public officials can be bribed, and so, like James, Danley cannot accommodate the case of an athlete who is bribed to lose a contest nor of a seller who bribes the purchasing agent of a firm.

A more careful and more adequate definition of bribery is proposed by Philips, who offers the following: “P accepts a bribe from R if and only if P agrees for payment to act in a manner dictated by R rather than doing what is required of him as a participant in his practice.” 23 Philip's definition of a bribe adequately captures the fact that when an athlete is paid to lose a contest, we characterize the payment as a “bribe”: the athlete is paid to refrain from doing what he is required to do (strive to win) as a participant in his sport. The definition also covers the case of the customs official who is given a bribe in order to induce him to comply with his duty. For although the official is paid to do what he should do, nevertheless he is charging to do what he—as a customs official—is required to do gratuitously.

Philip's definition of bribery seems to provide a characterization of the concept that is adequate enough for our purposes. For the reasons delineated above it seems to escape the problems that afflict other definitions, and it seems to adequately capture the kinds of exchanges we would want to count as bribes. I should note, however, that, like the classic definition of corruption that I described above, this definition of bribery is also subject to ambiguity. What, for example, is to count as a “practice” and who is to count as a “participant”? Moreover, how are we to determine the requirements of a practice, particularly when the requirements are unwritten norms? While Philip's definition of bribery is good enough for our purposes, it is clear that what counts as a bribe by his definition will depend on the background beliefs we have about the nature and requirements of the various practices that surround us, beliefs that can differ from one time and place to another. In the discussion that follows, however, I will assume that Philip's definition is a sufficiently adequate characterization of bribery and turn to the question of why bribery in particular and corruption in general are viewed as morally wrong.

The Ethics of Bribery and Corruption

The legislative initiatives that I mentioned earlier—such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—take aim at businesses that pay bribes to government officials (as distinct from the officials who receive those bribes). They assume, that is, that it is wrong for a business to give a bribe to a government official, and they attempt to render this act illegal. What rationale underlies this assumption that it is wrong to offer bribes to government officials (or, for that matter, to bribe the agent of any organization)? Consider that it is at least a bit more immediately obvious why it is morally wrong for an official to accept a bribe. In accepting a bribe the official agrees to act in a way that subverts the role he has agreed to play as a government official. Rules governing the official's role may, of course, be formally spelled out in the explicit organizational rules, or legal rules, that define his role but they need not be. It is enough that he has agreed to serve in a way that rules out accepting bribes to perform the act the briber asks him to perform. The official who accepts a bribe, therefore, violates the role that he has agreed to play as a government official. Still, the question remains why is it wrong for the bearer of the payment—the party that supplies the bribe—to give the payment to a government official? Why should the act of this other party, the one who provides the benefit, be rendered illegal as the various legislative initiatives propose to do?

The standard answer—and, I believe, the fundamentally correct answer—is that it is morally wrong for a business person to bribe a government official—even in the absence of any legal rule prohibiting it—because by doing so he or she is causing, helping, or participating in the morally wrongful act of that official. The giving of a bribe to an official is wrong because by giving the bribe the briber leads the official to violate the standards that govern his role: The briber does wrong because he causes (or helps) an official to do wrong, and if it is wrong for a person to do something, then it is wrong to intentionally cause or help that person to do it. The moral wrongfulness of the act of giving a bribe, then, depends on—is parasitic on—the moral wrongfulness of the act of accepting a bribe. If this is correct, then bribing a government official is wrong because it is wrong for a government official to accept a bribe. This conclusion is supported by another consideration. Suppose that there were nothing morally wrong with having an official accept a bribe. Would there then be anything morally wrong with offering the official the bribe? The answer, I think, is that there would not be. Suppose, to take an earlier example, that a German Jew gives a Nazi official something of value so that the official will not kill or imprison him as he has been officially ordered to do. Then the Jew has bribed the official according to the definition of bribery I accepted above. But in letting the Jew escape the official has not done something that is morally wrong, and neither has the Jew behaved immorally by giving the bribe. Thus the giving of a bribe is not in itself an immoral act. Bribery becomes immoral when, as in the usual case, it causes or helps to cause an immoral act.

Why, then, is it wrong for a government official to accept a bribe; or, more broadly, why is it wrong for a government official to engage in corruption? I believe that the best way to answer this question is by returning to the three kinds of definitions of corruption that I discussed earlier. The three approaches to defining corruption that I outlined above each suggest a distinct response to the question of why it is wrong for an official to accept a bribe. Each suggests an analysis of the ethics of corruption that is more or less distinct from the analysis to which one is led by the other definitions. Accordingly, I will now turn to considering the arguments suggested by each of the definitions in order to see whether they provide an adequate justification of the view that it is wrong for a government official to accept a bribe and, therefore, wrong for a business to offer a bribe.

The “Formal Duties” Argument

Consider the thought behind the definition of “corruption” by Joseph Nye: corruption is “behavior which deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of private‐regarding… gains.” 24 The idea here is that there are certain rules or fiduciary obligations (embodied in written laws or unwritten public norms) that attach to the role of the government official, and corrupt acts are those by which the official violates the obligations attaching to his or her role. Corruption in government is wrong, then, because the corrupt public official does what the rules of his office require him not to do. A variant of this argument is a teleological argument claiming that political institutions have certain specific purposes (e.g., to secure the common good of all and not the private interests of those who provide bribes) and that it is wrong for officials to violate these purposes. Corrupt acts are acts in which an agent violates or undermines the rules and purposes that define the role he has accepted.

Why is it wrong for the official to transgress these rules or to violate these purposes? It is wrong, the argument continues, because in accepting her office the official implicitly or explicitly agrees to abide by these rules and to work to achieve those purposes. 25 Corruption, according to this argument, is a failure to live up to one's agreements—a failure to do what one has, in effect, promised to do. Corruption is wrong, therefore, because it is wrong to break one's promises. For a business to bribe an official, is wrong because by doing so the business is wrongly inducing the official to transgress the very rules and purposes of office to which the official has promised to adhere.

There are several problems with this argument. First, it is not clear exactly what normative rules or obligations are supposed to attach to any particular office. The legal rules that govern public service, of course, may be more or less clear, and, arguably, one has an ethical obligation to obey the law. But from a normative point of view, these legal rules cannot be taken as definitive: law is not the same as morality. What are the moral norms that govern public service? It is these that are not everywhere obvious. It is not clear, as we saw above, that all societies are in agreement about the norms that should govern public service. 26 In particular, there are some societies—such as parts of rural India and of Africa—in which it is acceptable for public officials to openly accept bribes, particularly if the salaries of those officials are so inadequate to live on that everyone expects and accepts that they must augment their income with bribes. 27

Second, it is not clear that individuals always actually make any kind of explicit or implicit promise to abide by a set of rules that excludes corruption when they accept a job in government. As just noted, in societies in which it is widely accepted that poorly paid government officials will provide their services only if they are paid (i.e., bribed) to do so, individuals who enter government service may have no intention to refrain from corruption by, say, taking bribes. When an individual in such a society accepts public office, far from making an implicit agreement to refrain from taking bribes, the individual may instead accept the position with the understanding that it will be perfectly legitimate for him to take bribes in order to supplement his salary. 28 And even in industrialized societies where bribes are widely rejected, individuals do not always understand themselves to be making a special kind of agreement when they accept a government job, particularly if they have received no training about the nature of public service and have no understanding of the norms to which they are expected to adhere. 29

The argument is only partially successful. The argument provides some support for the claim that corruption is wrong within societies where bribery is clearly not accepted and where people who accept a job in government do so with the explicit understanding that they are not to engage in corrupt activities to supplement their income. This would be the case, for example, in societies where government officials are given training that makes this understanding clear, or are provided with codes of conduct that make the prohibitions on bribery explicit, or where public media—such as daily newspapers or news programs—regularly highlight the idea that public officials are prohibited from accepting bribes. Such societies may well include most of the developed nations. But, not all officials in all societies accept their positions in government with this understanding and so the argument fails for them.

The Public‐Private Argument

Consider, next, the idea that underlies the second definition of corruption I looked at above and that is favored by many economists: “corruption is the misuse of public power for private gain.” The idea here is that government resources and services belong to the public and any monies accruing to those resources or services likewise belong to the public. When the government official extracts a fee for providing his services and then pockets the fee, he has taken for his private use what belongs to the public: the corrupt official appropriates as his property what is public property. Corruption is, therefore, a kind of theft of property and since theft is immoral, corruption is immoral. On this view, therefore, for a business to bribe an official is wrong because by doing so the business is getting the official to steal what belongs to the public and to put it at the private service of the briber's business.

This argument on the wrongfulness of corruption depends on a distinction between the public nature of government and the private realm. But this distinction is not present in all political systems, and so the argument cannot be unqualifiedly accepted. 30 The modern distinction between the public and the private is, as I noted above, a relatively recent one that emerged in the mid‐ and late nineteenth century with the development of modern governments characterized by what Weber calls “bureaucracy.” 31 A bureaucracy is a system of offices, each with defined duties such that

office holding is not considered ownership of a course of income, to be exploited for rents or emoluments in exchange for the rendering of certain services… Rather, entrance into an office… is considered an acceptance of a specific duty of fealty to the purpose of the office in return for the grant of a secure existence. It is decisive for the modern loyalty to an office that, in the pure type, it does not establish a relationship to a person, like the vassal's or disciple's faith under feudal or patrimonial authority, but rather is devoted to impersonal and functional purposes. 32

Weber contrasts this modern ideal of government with what he calls “patrimonial authority,” a form of governance based on the kind of personal authority exercised by the master of a household whose household members exhibit a “strictly personal loyalty” to the master in the exercise of their household duties. Patrimonial governments arise when one master establishes domination over other masters, creating the need for a system of offices to administer the increased complexity and extent of the ruler's domain. However, notes Weber, “the patrimonial office lacks above all the bureaucratic separation of the private [from]… the official sphere. For the political administration [of patrimonial governance], too, is treated as a purely personal affair of the ruler, and political power is considered part of his personal property which can be exploited by means of contributions and fees.” 33 Because the state and its administration are the personal property of the ruler (and not of the public), the ruler can give or sell an office and its rents 34 to a subject (what in medieval Europe was called a “fee benefice”). 35 Both the office and its rents then become the private property of the person occupying the office.

Weber's description of the patrimonial state is significant because it describes a regime in which the concept of corruption as “the abuse of public office for private interests” makes little sense; offices in the patrimonial state are seen not as the property of the public but as the private property of the ruler or the persons to whom the ruler has given or sold the offices. Prior to the seventeenth century, as I noted above, most states were organized as patrimonial states including the Mogul empires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in India, the dynastic kingdoms of China from the Chin dynasty to the fall of the Empire in the twentieth century, the great Egyptian kingdoms of antiquity, and the absolute monarchies of France (until the French Revolution), Spain (until the Thirty Years War), and England (until the civil wars in the middle of the seventeenth century). 36 Throughout these periods in these regimes “corruption” was not thought of as “the misuse of public office for private benefit” because offices were not considered public but private. Moral condemnations of “corruption” were common in Europe and England during this period, but in every case the condemnations were aimed at churchmen or judges and their “corruption” did not involve “the abuse of public office for private interests.” In the case of churchmen, corruption referred to the sale of spiritual goods (i.e., simony) which, because such goods ultimately belonged to God, should have been freely given; in the case of judges, corruption meant they showed favoritism or accepted bribes and so failed to resolve disputes between the ruler's subjects in the impartial manner desired by the ruler who had put them in charge of his courts. 37 Neither churchmen nor judges were thought of as misusing a “public” office.

Moving to a more recent period, several observers of less developed nations have argued that many today are patrimonial or “neopatrimonial” states. Zolberg has argued that the single‐party regimes of West Africa are patrimonial states; 38 Roth has claimed the same of the regimes of Morocco, the sheikhdoms of the Gulf, and Thailand. 39 Medard has argued that the nations of sub‐Saharan Africa are “neopatrimonial.” 40 These central African nations were colonized by Europeans when these nations were full fledged patrimonial regimes. Although they adopted the external forms of European bureaucracies, they retained a tribal conception of political office as the private property of the officeholder. The result is a “mixed” system where the values of patrimonialism now exist side by side with the external structures of bureaucracy, but where the distinction between the public and private domains “is made, but rarely internalized, and even when it is, it is not respected.” 41 In these patrimonial and neopatrimonial systems government is conceived as the property of the leader and offices as the property of those who have bought or been given these offices. Corruption, defined as the abuse of public office for private interests, is a concept that is alien to these patrimonial and neopatrimonial states, and it is particularly alien to the consciousness of the great masses of people who have not been schooled in Western ways and who daily participate in exchanges that we would label as “corrupt.” 42

The argument, then, that corruption and bribery are wrong because they involve the private taking of what belongs to the public does not hold for these patrimonial and neopatrimonial states. 43 It does not follow, however, that the argument is completely defective. For the argument sheds valuable light on the wrongness of corruption in modern bureaucratic states where the public‐private distinction is tightly built into the structure of government and the worldviews of citizens. In relation to such fully bureaucratized states the argument seems correct: it is wrong for the government official to demand or accept a bribe because in doing so the official is appropriating for his private use what is recognized as belonging to the public. But the applicability of this argument is limited to modern bureaucratic states where the private‐public distinction is prevalent and, in particular, does not apply to patrimonial or neopatrimonial states.

The “Harm” Argument

A third kind of argument in support of the claim that corruption and bribery are wrong is based on the idea that an act of corruption is, as I quoted Friedrich above as stating, one in which an “office holder is… induced to take actions which favor whoever provides the reward and thereby damages the group.” The idea here is that corruption has harmful consequences to the larger group of society—it damages the “public interest”—and so, on utilitarian grounds, is unethical. The business that bribes the government official, then, is getting the official to harm society and so is engaged in wrongdoing.

Such an argument, of course, will not show that every single act of corruption is wrong since, as we have seen, it is at least conceivable that in some cases, under some circumstances, a particular act of corruption might have such good consequences that they outweigh that particular act's harmful consequences. Rather, the argument appeals to a form of rule‐utilitarianism, that is, it is an argument that purports to show that the practice of corruption generally leads to bad consequences and therefore, such acts should be prohibited by a moral rule.

Such consequentialist arguments have been particularly prevalent in economists' discussions of corruption. One recent stream of empirical research on corruption demonstrates that corruption has a negative impact on the ratio of (domestic and foreign) investment to a country's gross domestic product (GDP). That is, the more corruption that exists in a given country, the lower its investment rate and, consequently, the lower its economic growth rate. 44 Other recent empirical studies have shown that corruption drives away foreign direct investment. 45 This effect of corruption is similar to that produced by a tax on foreign investment except that the negative effects of corruption are worse since they are more arbitrary and unpredictable.

Empirical studies have also shown that bonds issued by countries with high levels of corruption carry a higher risk premium than those issued by countries with lower levels of corruption and that corruption therefore increases a country's cost of capital. 46 Corruption has been shown to be inversely correlated with per capita Gross Domestic Product so that the higher a country's level of corruption, the lower that country's per capita GDP. 47 Higher levels of corruption are also associated with lower levels of growth of GDP. 48

Other studies have shown that corruption is associated with misallocation of public funds. High levels of corruption, for example, are correlated with lower government investments in the provision of public health services and of education, both of which offer few opportunities for rent‐seeking. 49 But, high levels of corruption are associated with overinvestment in large infrastructure projects 50 and arms procurement, 51 both of which offer greater opportunities for rent‐seeking. Corruption is also associated with higher levels of environmental pollution due, presumably, to lowered investments in government oversight. 52

Despite the plethora of recent studies showing that corruption has bad consequences, it is not clear that these studies provide adequate support for the claim that corruption is therefore wrong from a rule‐utilitarian or consequentialist point of view. First, these empirical studies are not completely unproblematic. Because corruption is always covert, there is no direct way of measuring how much corruption is prevalent in a given country. Accordingly, all of the empirical studies noted above rely on surveys that ask business people and others how much corruption they believe is present in a given country. Such subjective judgments form a problematic basis for empirical studies of corruption particularly in light of the fact that, as we saw when I discussed the various definitions of corruption, what one observer in one culture will count as corruption may not be seen as corruption by observers of other cultures. Indeed if there is any consistency in the responses provided by the respondents to such surveys, that consistency can be credited to the fact that many or most of the respondents being surveyed are members of Western or industrialized societies who share similar bureaucratic conceptions of government and public service.

Secondly, there are studies of some countries that suggest that corruption can have good consequences. It has been argued, for example, that corruption can reduce risk for investors, can motivate officials to relax costly regulations, and can encourage efficiency since the most efficient firms, presumably, can pay the highest bribes. 53 Others have argued that corruption can reduce red tape and excessive bureaucratic rules, thereby also encouraging greater efficiency. 54 And it has been argued that in nations where corruption is deeply entwined into a nation's political and cultural institutions, corruption has a stabilizing effect and so the elimination of corruption could lead to instability and anarchy. 55

Thirdly, and most importantly, entirely apart from whether corruption has good or bad consequences, an answer to the question whether the practice of corruption should be prohibited from a consequentialist point of view would have to weigh the costs of the alternative to corruption, that is, the costs of doing away with corruption. In some nations so‐called “corrupt” practices are embedded in cultural practices (such as gift exchanges) that are valued by participants. The anthropologist Alex Kondos, for example, has argued on the basis of his ethnographic studies that in Nepal interactions with government officials are considered interpersonal exchanges to be mediated by flattery, praise, and the bestowal of gifts upon government officials, who in turn are expected to show favoritism and partiality toward the devout gift giver. 56 Despite the fact that Westerners see such gifts and the resulting lack of impartiality as instances of corruption, the Nepalese, he claims, prefer these kinds of interactions, embedded as they are in Hindu traditions that associate the gifts given to government representatives with the offerings to deities, gurus, and other Hindu rituals that give meaning and a cultural context to life. Others have made analogous claims about Bengal 57 and China. 58 If these cultural anthropologists are correct, then, arguably, to try to do away with such “corrupt” practices could be a costly matter that would inflict some level of cultural harm on the populations of these countries. The economic costs of corruption may well outweigh such noneconomic costs of doing away with corruption, but that has never been demonstrated.

The “harm” argument against corruption, then, while somewhat persuasive, still leaves room for doubt as a basis on which to prohibit corruption. While there is considerable empirical evidence that the practice of corruption has significantly harmful or costly consequences, this empirical evidence suffers from methodological problems. More importantly, little is known about the other side of the issue, that is, about the beneficial noneconomic consequences of corruption (if any) or about the costs associated with doing away with corruption. Therefore, little is known about what utilitarian theories most value: the on‐balance benefits and costs of practices. The various arguments do demonstrate that the practice of corruption has costly consequences, but some corrupt activities certainly have acceptable consequences even if most do not.

What can we conclude from this examination of the three main arguments for the claim that corruption is unethical? Each of the arguments seems to provide some support for the claim that corruption is wrong, although each has its problems and these problems limit the applicability of the arguments. On balance it appears to this author that the arguments above show that corruption is generally unethical within modern Western cultural contexts where the norms governing institutional roles are clear and where key concepts like the public‐private distinction are well entrenched. However, the arguments do not show that corruption is unethical where the norms governing institutional roles are not widely known or accepted and where government is not understood as having the kind of public purpose that it is assumed to serve by members of Western societies. Below I will discuss the implications of these conclusions.

I argued earlier that it is wrong for businesses to engage in bribery to the extent that it is wrong for officials to accept bribes. This led us to examine the arguments that purport to show that it is wrong for officials to accept bribes. I have now concluded that while the arguments show that it is generally wrong for officials to accept bribes within modern Western cultural contexts, the arguments do not show that it is in itself wrong for officials to accept bribes in societies that view their institutions as having a nature and a purpose that differs from our own view of their nature and purpose. This would imply that it is not necessarily wrong for businesses to provide bribes in such societies.

This is a troubling conclusion. How should businesses deal with this unsettling moral ambiguity? If bribery and corruption are sometimes but not always morally wrong, then what are businesses to do when confronted with the outstretched hands of foreign officials? I will conclude with a discussion of this important question.

Dealing with the Moral Ambiguities of Bribery and Corruption

Let us begin by discussing first how businesses should deal with bribery and corruption in countries where the norms and expectations that govern official roles are relatively clear and well known, and where the public‐private distinction is recognized, accepted, and well entrenched in the bureaucratic institutions of the society. The developed nations and many of the developing ones fall into this category.

The arguments above imply that in such societies it is morally wrong for officials to accept bribes because in doing so, first, they violate the explicit norms of the roles they have knowingly agreed to accept; second, they appropriate for their private purposes the power and property that belongs to the public and that is to be used to further public ends; and third, they engage in practices that have costly and harmful consequences. It is wrong, therefore, for business people to offer bribes to officials in such societies since by doing so they cause or help to cause the wrongful acts of those officials and so are direct accessories to the immoral corrupt act of the official. To ensure that employees recognize the wrongness of offering bribes in such cases and that they abide by this recognition, it is important, of course, that businesses develop and implement clear policies and procedures regarding bribes, and there are now several guides available that can assist companies in the development and implementation of such policies and procedures such as Transparency International's “Six Step Implementation Process,” a “practical guide for companies implementing anti‐bribery policies and procedures.” 59

Still, even in the developed societies described in the paragraph above, it may not be wrong for a business to give an official a bribe. Discussions of the ethics of bribery often distinguish wrongfully offering a bribe, on the one hand, from yielding to “extortion” on the other. The distinction turns on whether the act of bribery is initiated by the person giving the bribe or by the person receiving the bribe. In the former case the briber offers the bribe to an official as an inducement to be treated favorably by the recipient in violation of the official's duties; in the latter case, the official demands the bribe from the giver of the bribe and makes the threat that if the bribe is not paid, the official will withhold something that the giver needs and without which the giver will suffer some harm. Suppose, for example, that a government purchasing agent has agreed to buy the highly perishable goods of a business and the business ships the goods to the agent. While the goods are en route the government agent tells the business that he will renege on the sale unless the business pays him a “fee” equal to 10 percent of the value of the sale. The official is here engaged in extortion.

A substantial number of ethicists have agreed that even where it is normally wrong to offer bribes to officials, it is not necessarily wrong to comply with the demands of an extortionist. 60 Thomas Carson argues, for example, that in many cases meeting the demand of the extortionist will not have economically injurious consequences. 61 Moreover, if the victim of the extortionist risks suffering significant harm if he does not meet the extortionist's demand, then the victim is not under an obligation to prevent the extortionist's immoral behavior. For no one is obligated to sacrifice one's own substantial interests in order to prevent someone else's moral failure, particularly if one's sacrifice will do nothing to help curb such failures in the future.

The arguments of Carson and others appear to be sound: in itself, acceding to the demands of an extortionist is not morally wrong provided that paying the bribe will not create significant social costs, and provided that the business will suffer significant harm if the demands of the extortionist are not met. It should be noted, however, that although acceding to extortion is not morally wrong in itself, it may be, and generally is, legally wrong to do so. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, for example, has no provision that allows the payment of extorted bribes, nor does the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions.

There is a second set of circumstances in which it may be morally permissible to pay a bribe even though it would ordinarily be wrong to bribe government officials. Such circumstances are those that involve what are called “facilitating payments.” A facilitating payment, sometimes referred to as a “grease payment,” is a relatively small payment made to a low‐level government official to get the official to perform in a timely manner a routine duty that the official is required to perform and to which the payer has a right. Facilitating payments are thus distinct from bribes given to induce an official to do something that violates the official's role duties and so to which the payer has no right.

The FCPA explicitly does not prohibit citizens from paying officials to expedite a “routine governmental action,” although under the laws of most countries it is illegal for government officials to receive such payments and illegal to make them. Specific examples of the kind of “routine governmental actions” specifically allowed by the FCPA include obtaining permits, licenses, or other official documents; processing governmental papers such as visas and work orders; providing police protection, mail pick‐up, and delivery; providing phone service, power and water supply; loading and unloading cargo or protecting perishable products; and scheduling inspections associated with contract performance or transit of goods across country. Most of the laws of other countries that prohibit the bribery of foreign officials also allow facilitating payments.

Although the FCPA and the anticorruption laws of other nations explicitly allow facilitating payments, ethicists have disagreed about whether making such payments is ethical. 62 Those who condemn facilitating payments as unethical point out that the official who receives the bribe is violating his role obligation to provide his services without payment. Thus, the person who provides the payment is encouraging a moral (and legal) failure. This point, however, can be countered. Those (such as this author) who defend facilitating payments as ethical in some circumstances, respond that unlike other forms of bribery, the person making a facilitating payment has a right to the service and the person receiving the bribe has an institutional obligation to render that service. Thus, the person paying the bribe is paying for something to which he is morally entitled, and he is providing the official with an incentive to fulfill his moral obligations. How could this be considered unethical? Moreover, when facilitating payments are demanded it is often the case that the person making the payment will suffer significant harm or inconvenience if the official demanding the payment follows through on his threat to withhold his services. A business that is in the process of constructing a building, for example, can suffer costly delays if it does not pay the petty officials who control building permits and who will delay processing the permits if they are not given a facilitating payment. Under such conditions, the payment is given involuntarily and so the giver of the payment cannot be morally blameworthy for making the payment, particularly if the payment has relatively insignificant social consequences, while his own losses would be large. Facilitating payments appear to be ethical, provided that (1) the person being bribed has an institutional obligation to provide the service for which he or she is being paid, (2) the person paying the official is entitled to the service and so is not asking the official to, say, lie or steal for him, (3) the person making the payment will suffer a relatively significant harm or major inconvenience if the service is not rendered, and (4) making this particular payment will have relatively insignificant costly consequences for society.

Doing Business in Societies with Different Normative Understandings

But more vexing questions arise when the business person finds himself or herself operating in a society where the conditions outlined above do not obtain, that is, societies where the normative understandings that govern official roles are significantly different from our own view that office holders should not accept bribes, societies where these understandings are simply not part of the consciousness of the average citizen, or societies where the public‐private distinction is neither widely recognized nor widely accepted. Such societies may be rife with bribery, nepotism, favoritism, and other activities that we would label as corrupt. I have argued that in such societies the payment of bribes by businesses is not necessarily morally wrong. Yet, as I also noted, the practice of bribery in such countries has significant social and private costs, which would imply that, at the least, bribery in such societies must be subjected to moral scrutiny. To be sure, the payment of bribes may be legally prohibited by the antibribery laws of the business's home country, such as the U.S. Federal Corrupt Practices Act, as well as by the unenforced laws of the host country. But from a moral point of view, and setting aside such laws, under what circumstances is the payment of bribes by businesses, in such societies, morally permissible in spite of the possibility of both social and private costs?

We can begin to answer this question by observing that much of the bribe paying that goes on in such societies takes the form of facilitating payments. Such payments, as I argued, are in themselves morally permissible provided that the payment is made to an official who has a duty to perform the service, the payer is entitled to the service (and so the service is not an illicit one) and would suffer significant harm if it is not rendered, and the payment has only negligible harmful side effects. Furthermore, in such societies much of the bribe paying that goes on is also the result of extortion: officials threaten citizens with significant harm unless they pay what they demand. I have argued that paying extorted bribes is not morally wrong provided that doing so will not lead to significant social costs and the harm threatened by the extortionist is substantial. To be sure, it is not easy to make the judgments that are called for when evaluating whether it is morally permissible to pay an extortionist or make a facilitating payment. Particularly in societies where corruption is widespread it is easy, but wrong, to think that since so many others are paying bribes, one is justified in doing so oneself, and that since everyone is going to engage in corruption anyway, one's own example will have little harmful effect on others. In addition, self interest can influence one's judgment and lead one to wrongly decide that a relatively minor inconvenience constitutes a substantial injury.

But what about situations where the bribe in question is neither a facilitating payment nor one that involves extortion and where the issue of bribery arises in a society where citizens lack the kind of understanding of bureaucratic offices that is common in the developed world? What about cases of bribes where the government is not understood as a public entity serving the interests of the public but where, instead, the boundary between the public and the private interests of the individual is blurred? As I noted above, following several anthropologists, there are numerous examples of such countries among the Arab sheikhdoms including the sultanate of Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as several non‐Arab developing nations such as Nepal, Thailand, and those postcolonial regimes of sub‐Saharan Africa in which tribal conceptions of rulership still operate such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, and Nigeria. In all of these countries, according to Transparency International, corruption and bribery are widespread. How are businesses to deal with bribery and corruption in such societies?

The Case of Nigeria

To make our discussion more concrete, let us take the example of Nigeria, a sub‐Saharan African nation of 132 million people with substantial oil reserves. 63 In spite of the vast wealth that flows from its oil, about 60 percent of the population lives under crushing poverty on less than US$1 per day. The World Bank has estimated that about 80 percent of Nigeria's oil revenues flow into the hands of 1 percent of its people. According to the U.S. Department of State's 2005 Human Rights Report , Nigerian government officials are responsible for or allow serious human rights abuses including politically motivated killings, hostage seizing, the beating and torture of suspects, extortion of citizens, violence, discrimination, child labor, and human trafficking. Corruption is endemic in Nigeria, which in 2007 was ranked 147 out of 179 countries by Transparency International, which ranks countries according to their level of perceived corruption.

Nigeria is a patrimonial state, of the sort that I discussed earlier. 64 Within the patrimonial state, as I noted, the distinction between what belongs to the “public” and what belongs to the private individual does not exist. Government is assumed to be the personal property of the ruler, who doles out offices to his followers and relatives who then are expected to use these offices as their own personal property. In such a context, as Patrick Chabal and Jena‐Pascal Daloz point out, corruption and bribery are not perceived as wrong:

Provided the beneficiaries of graft do not hoard too much of what they accumulate by means of the resources made available to them through their position, and provided they redistribute along lines that are judged to be socially desirable, their behavior is deemed acceptable. Corruption is not, therefore, a matter of a few “rotten apples” or of a venal “class,” even less as an “evil” to be eradicated by means of vigorous “ethical” campaigns. On the contrary, it is a habitual part of everyday life, an expected element of every social transaction. This ought not to surprise us. As we have already emphasized, there is in Africa a marked reluctance to abide by the abstract and universalist norms of the legal‐bureaucratic order that are the foundations of Western polities.… Expectations of probity, therefore, appear to be limited to one's kith and kin, the members of one's community, but they obviously cease to apply beyond. The usual response by Nigerians to the charge that their country is deemed by some to be the most corrupt on earth is: “This is how we do things in Nigeria!” 65

Chabal and Daloz concede that “corruption is rarely condoned and, even, that it is frequently condemned in countries, like Nigeria, where it has reached gargantuan proportions.” 66 However, they argue, “with few exceptions, such anti‐corruption discourse is primarily rhetorical and… the recurrent purges which follow are, more often than not, convenient devices for eliminating political rivals rather than a real attempt to reform the political ‘order.’ ” 67 How should companies deal with corruption in a country like Nigeria?

First, and obviously, companies are not forced to do business with, or in, high corruption societies like that of Nigeria. If, before entering a country, a business perceives that operating there is very likely to require it to engage in activities that will violate or compromise its own standards of conduct and impose significant costs on the company and possibly on the host country, it is better for the company to take its business elsewhere before it makes large investments from which it cannot easily extricate itself. Moreover, the regimes of many high‐corruption nations like Nigeria are repressive and systematically violate the human rights of their citizens. This has been the case throughout the series of military and civilian regimes that have dominated Nigeria until now. 68 Contributing to such repressive regimes by providing bribes or kickbacks to ruling elites helps the regime continue its human rights violations and is best avoided regardless of whether or not bribery is wrong in itself.

Secondly, when a company provides jobs, services, or goods that the government of a high‐corruption nation strongly desires, it is possible for the company to simply refuse to give officials any bribes and, even, to engage the government in instituting reforms. Shell Oil, for example, is a British company that has operated in Nigeria for several decades. During the early 1990s, Shell cooperated with a series of corrupt and abusive Nigerian regimes and did not seem to have cared whether it engaged in bribery or cooperated with these Nigerian governments who were regularly violating the human rights of their citizens. The company's stance was severely criticized by Amnesty International and other NGOs who argued that the company was complicit in the government's persecution of the Ogoni—including extrajudicial executions, torture, and the destruction of Ogoni homes—an ethnic minority on whose tribal lands Shell and other oil companies were drilling and whose lands Shell had helped to turn into an environmentally polluted disaster. In 1995, Shell was further accused of being complicit in the government's execution on trumped up charges of Ogoni activist Ken Saro‐Wiwo and eight other Ogoni tribespeople who had led a nonviolent movement protesting the environmental damage being inflicted on their homeland. The deaths of Saro‐Wiwo and his Ogoni companions were met with enormous international outrage, much of it focused on Shell. Stung by the ferocity of criticism, Shell responded with a remarkable turnaround. The company not only adopted one of the world's most progressive environmental programs but also began to annually issue a “Sustainability Report” that openly describes how well or poorly it is doing with respect to a number of social indicators, including its use of armed security, employee deaths, its monitoring of child labor, its environmental pollution, and the number of bribes it has offered. Shell proclaims in its reports that “we are a ‘no bribes’ fair competition business” and its audited “Sustainability Reports” seem to bear this out. 69 Thus, Shell's example shows that it is possible for a company, even when operating in a nation as corrupt as Nigeria, to successfully avoid bribery. Moreover, the company notes in its reports that its policy of “engagement” with the government has helped reform local security forces and supported initiatives that have led to greater investment in education, health care, and other social programs. Thus, when a company has committed itself to doing business in a country like Nigeria, it should not assume that it has no choice but to bribe, but instead should examine (1) whether it is in a position to avoid bribery completely and (2) whether it has sufficient standing to engage the government in making reforms that may reduce the country's corruption levels or, at least, its human rights violations.

Thirdly, I have argued that in patrimonial societies like Nigeria, the giving of bribes is not in itself necessarily unethical. But that does not end the matter. While the giving of a bribe may not in itself be unethical in nations like Nigeria, any particular act of bribery may still have consequences that make that particular bribe unethical. As indicated above, before 1995 Shell was probably engaged in paying bribes to various political regimes in Nigeria that in turn were violating the human rights of citizens. These regimes, moreover, were actively pursuing policies that unjustly increased inequality and fostered discrimination against minorities such as the Ogoni. The bribes also imposed heavy social costs on Nigeria insofar as the ruling elites siphoned off enormous amounts of oil monies that could have been invested in health care, education, housing, and other investments that could improve the welfare of its desperately poor citizens; these monies were, instead, spent on “consumption of imported consumer items, acquisition of a Mercedes, taking a new wife, or throwing a big party.” 70 No doubt, the bribes also imposed costs on Shell managers who would have had to spend substantial amounts of time negotiating with government officials. And, finally, the bribes in some cases may have required officials to engage in deception, theft, or other illicit activity, for example by undervaluing a customs declaration, or canceling legitimate taxes, or paying for goods that will not be delivered. 71 All of these consequences are important moral considerations that imply that any bribes Shell was paying were morally unjustified because of these consequences even if in themselves the acts were morally neutral. Thus, even when bribery occurs in a cultural context in which bribery is in itself a morally neutral act, the agent must ask whether this otherwise morally neutral act (1) will contribute to substantial violations of the human rights of others, (2) will have distributive effects that are significantly unjust or unfair, (3) will generate large social and personal costs, or (4) will require serious deception, theft, or other similar illicit activity. If any of these questions is answered in the affirmative, then it is probable that the act is unethical. If all are answered in the affirmative, then it is virtually certain. It is only when all of the questions can clearly and honestly be answered in the negative that bribery can be presumed to be morally acceptable in patrimonial societies like Nigeria.

Other Patrimonial Societies

Not all societies, of course, are like Nigeria. I have purposely taken Nigeria as an example because it raises in sharp relief the kinds of oppressive conditions that are found in many high‐corruption countries and that must be taken into account when evaluating the ethics of particular acts of bribery. But in patrimonial societies that are more benign than Nigeria, bribery can itself be a more benign act. Examples of such relatively benign societies include Arab nations like the sheikdoms of the United Arab Emirates and the sultanate of Oman; in both nations citizens enjoy a relatively high standard of living due to their oil resources and their governments enjoy wide support and stability. 72 While what Transparency International would characterize as “corruption” in the Emirates and Oman is not at the high levels found in Nigeria, Transparency International, nevertheless, holds that there is a substantial amount of “corruption” in both countries. But in both countries the private‐public distinction is not recognized and the apparatus of the state is seen as belonging to the reigning monarch. As a Sudanese observer notes:

In the Arab [world], where there are absolute autocratic regimes, the concept of corruption loses all meaning, as the law is the ruler's will; he decides what is permitted and what is forbidden, and his bonuses and gifts are a legitimate livelihood. If the ruler so decides, he will give his sons a monopoly on import or export; will permit them to purchase abroad at a tenth of [the merchandise's] value and be reimbursed for the full price by the state treasury; will allow his friends and cronies to use public property or state revenues, or will give them land. In these cases, we are talking of the embodiment of legitimate gain. 73

The sultanate of Oman and the sheikdoms of the United Emirates are the kind of “absolute autocratic regimes” where “the concept of corruption loses all meaning.” Moreover, in such regimes the four questions about particular bribes that I noted in the last paragraph—what impact does the act have on human rights, on distributive justice, on social and personal costs, and on illicit behavior?—will sometimes be answered in the negative. In such cases, and from a moral point of view, a particular act of bribery will be morally benign.

I have tried to show, then, that while corruption and bribery in most developed and developing nations are unethical, there are specific and identifiable cultural contexts within which they may be morally indifferent acts. I have argued, moreover, that even where corruption and bribery are unethical, there are circumstances that can render them morally acceptable, while even where corruption and bribery are morally indifferent acts, there are circumstances that can render particular instances of such acts morally wrong. In both instances, I have tried to identify the kind of difficult questions that a business person should consider when trying to decide how to approach ethical decision making on this difficult subject. This chapter can be seen as a prolonged plea for bringing a thoughtful and careful analysis to the cultural context, and the particular circumstances, within which moral decisions regarding corruption and bribery must be made. It is as much a mistake to think that a blanket condemnation of corruption and bribery can settle all questions in this culturally and morally ambiguous area, as it is a mistake to think that an approval of corruption and bribery in certain societies can relieve one of having to think about the ethics of what one is doing.

World Bank, “The Costs of Corruption,” press release, Washington, D.C., April 8, 2004.

Transparency International, “Transparency International Publishes 1997 Corruption Perceptions Index,” press release, (Berlin), July 31, 1997, which quotes Dr. Peter Eigen, chairman of Transparency International, as saying: “I urge the public to recognize that a large share of the corruption is the explicit product of multinational corporations, headquartered in leading industrialized countries, using massive bribery and kickbacks to buy contracts in the developing world and the countries in transition.”

3. Susan Rose‐Ackerman , Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences, and Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

United Nations, “United Nations Global Compact,” http://www.unglobalcompact.org/aboutthegc/thetenprinciples/index.html (accessed April 1, 2008).

In fact, all of the legislative initiatives described in the preceding paragraphs are aimed at controlling the payment of bribes to government officials, and such bribes have been the focus of virtually all of the studies of the costs of corruption. I know of no studies that have looked at the costs of any other kind of bribery.

6. Michael Johnson , “The Search for Definitions: the Vitality of Politics and the Issue of Corruption,” International Social Science Journal 48 (1996): 321–335.

Aristotle, Politics , 1279a.

Transparency International, for example, “the global civil society organization leading the fight against corruption,” devotes virtually no attention whatsoever to business‐to‐ business corruption (see http://www.transparency.org ), nor does the anticorruption unit of the World Bank ( http://go.worldbank.org/QYRWVXVH40 ). Moreover, none of the legislative initiatives criminalizing bribery and corruption that numerous countries have adopted in response to the 1997 OECD convention on bribery concern themselves with the issue of business‐to‐business corruption.

Johnson, “Search for Definitions,” 322–325.

See D. Nissenbaum, “Davis at Center of International Trade Dispute,” San Jose Mercury News , June 29, 2002, which notes that the kind of favoritism California governor Grey Davis showed to the industry of a key campaign donor was criticized as an abuse of power by British observers.

11. Koenraad W. Swart , Sale of Offices in the Seventeenth Century (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1949).

12. T. Louise Brown , The Challenge to Democracy in Nepal (New York: Routledge, 1996), 72.

13. Joseph S. Nye , “Corruption and Political Development: A Cost‐Benefit Analysis,” American Political Science Review 61 (1967): 419.

14. United Nations Development Program , Fighting Corruption to Improve Governance (New York: United Nations Development Programme, 1999), 7.

15. Rose‐Ackerman, Corruption and Government , 91; see also A. W. Goudie and D. Stasavage , Corruption: The Issues (Paris: OECD, 1997) , and Robert Klitgaard , “National and International Strategies for Reducing Corruption,” OECD Symposium on Corruption and Good Governance (Paris: OECD, 1996), 37–54.

17. Jean‐Francois Medard , “Patrimonialism, Neo‐patrimonialism, and the Study of the Post‐colonial State in Sub‐Saharan Africa,” in Improved Natural Resource Management: The Role of Formal Organizations and Informal Networks and Institutions , ed. H. S. Marcussen (Roskilde, Denmark: Roskilde University, Institute of International Development Studies, 1996), 76–97.

18. Carl J. Friedrich , “Corruption Concepts in Historical Perspective,” in Political Corruption: A Handbook , ed. Arnold J. Heidenheimer , Michael Johnston , and Victor T. LeVine . (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2007), 15.

19. A. W. Goudie , and D. Stasavage , Corruption: The Issues (Paris: OECD, 1997)

20. John T. Noonan , Bribes (New York: Macmillan, 1984).

22. John Danley , “Toward a Theory of Bribery,” Business and Professional Ethics Journal 2 (1984): 19–39.

23. Michael Philips , “Bribery,” Ethics 94 (1984): 623.

Nye, “Corruption and Political Development,” 419.

25. Thomas L. Carson , “Bribery, Extortion, and ‘The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,’” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985): 66–90.

28. Alex Kondos , “The Question of ‘Corruption’ in Nepal,” Mankind 17 (1987): 15–29.

Several years ago I used to provide ethics training to people who aspired to careers in local California politics. Part of the training included a discussion of conflict of interests. Invariably, at least a third of the participants would indicate that they previously had not known that office holders are obligated to refrain from using their public office to serve a private interest.

30. Manuel Velasquez , “Is Corruption Always Corrupt?” in Corporate Integrity and Accountability , ed. George G. Brenkert (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2004), 148–165.

31. Max Weber , Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology , ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956).

32. Ibid. , 959.

33. Ibid. , 1028–1029.

Weber uses the term “rent” to refer to the monies that an office holder is able to extract from his clients in exchange for the services provided by his office.

Weber, Economy and Society , 1031ff.

36. R. Theobald , Corruption, Development and Underdevelopment (London: The Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1990) , 19–20; Weber, Economy and Society , 956.

Noonan, Bribes .

38. A. Zolberg , Creating Political Order: The Party‐States of West Africa (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1966).

40. Medard, “Patrimonialism, Neo‐patrimonialism, and the Study of the Post‐colonial State in Sub‐Saharan Africa.”

41. Ibid. , 85.

Velasquez, “Is Corruption Always Corrupt?”

47. David Kaufmann , A. Kraay , and P. Zoido‐Lobaton , “Aggregating Governance Indicators,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper no. 2195 (Washington D.C,: World Bank, 1999).

48. P. Mauro , “The Effects of Corruption on Growth, Investment, and Government Expenditure: A Cross‐Country Analysis,” Corruption and the Global Economy , (Washington, D.C: Institute for International Economics, 1997), 83–107.

49. S. Gupta , H. Davoodi , and E. R. Tiongson , “Corruption and the Provision of Health Care and Education Services,” The Political Economy of Corruption , ed. A. K. Jain (London: Routledge, 2001), 111–141 . Note that the term “rent‐seeking” is here being used in the economist's sense of seeking to make money by manipulating the legal or economic environment rather than through some productive activity. The term “rent” here, therefore, does not refer to income derived from the ownership of land.

50. D. Esty and M. Porter , “National Environmental Performance Measurement and Determinants,” in Environmental Performance Measurement: The Global Report 2001–2002 , ed. D. Esty and P. Cornelius (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

55. J. Charap and C. Harm , “Institutionalized Corruption and the Kleptocratic State,” in Governance, Corruption, and Economic Performance , ed. George T. Abed and Sanjeev Gupta (Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 2002).

56. Alex Kondos , “The Question of Corruption in Nepal,” Mankind 17 (1987): 15–29.

57. A. E. Ruud , Corruption as Everyday Practice: Rules and Rule‐bending in Local Indian Society (Working Paper 1998.4), Center for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo (1998).

Available on the Transparency International Web site, www.transparency.org/global_priorities/private_sector/business_principles/six_step_implementation_process.

Carson, “Bribery, Extortion, and ‘The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.’”

Transparency International, for example, takes the position that facilitating payments are wrong, see Transparency International, “Business Principles for Countering Bribery: Guidance Document”, Issue III, November 2004, 23–24, http://www.transparency.org/global_priorities/private_sector/business_principles/guidance_document .

The information in this paragraph is drawn from Library of Congress—Federal Research Division, Country Profile: Nigeria , June 2006, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/profiles/Nigeria.pdf (accessed November 20, 2007).

64. Patrick Chabal and Jean‐Pascal Daloz , Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999).

65. Chabal and Daloz, Africa Works , 99–100.

66. Ibid. , 104.

Amnesty International, Amnesty International Report 2007 , http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/africa/west‐africa/nigeria (accessed November 22, 2007).

“The Short Arm of the Law,” The Economist , March 2, 2002, 63–65.

70. T. J. Biersteker , Multinationals, the State, and Control of the Nigerian Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 148.

71. Giorgio Blundo and Jean‐Pierre Olivier de Sardan , Everyday Corruption and the State: Citizens and Public Officials in Africa (New York: Zed, 2006), 73.

72. The information in this paragraph is drawn from Helen Chapin Metz , ed., Persian Gulf States: Country Studies (Washington D.C.: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1993) , http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/profiles (accessed November 20, 2007).

Abd Al‐Whhab Al‐Effendi, “Fighting Corruption [in the Arab World] is Like Fighting Catholicism in the Vatican.” Dar Al‐Hayat [London‐based Arabic daily], August 6, 2002, http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP41102#_edn1 (accessed December 10, 2007).

Suggested Reading

Andvig, Jens Chr.   Odd‐Helge Fjeldstad   Inge Amundsen   Tone Sissener and Tina Soreide . Research on Corruption: A Policy Oriented Survey, Final Report . Commissioned by NORAD. Bergen, Norway: Chr Michelsen Institute, 2000 . http://www.icgg.org/downloads/contribution07_andvig.pdf .

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Danley, John. “ Toward a Theory of Bribery. ” Business and Professional Ethics Journal 2 ( 1984 ): 19–39.

Heidenheimer, Arnold J. , and Michael Johnston , eds., Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts , 3rd ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2007 .

Johnston, Michael . “ The Search for Definitions: The Vitality of Politics and the Issue of Corruption. ” International Social Science Journal 48 ( 1996 ): 321–335.

Lambsdorff, Johann Graf . Consequences and Causes of Corruption—What Do We Know from a Cross‐Section of Countries? (Passau: Passau University, 2006 ). Http://www.icgg.org/downloads/Causes%20and%20Consequences%20of%20Corruption%20‐%20Cross‐Section.pdf/ .

Mauro, P. “The Effects of Corruption on Growth, Investment, and Government Expenditure: A Cross‐Country Analysis.” In Corruption and the Global Economy . Edited by Kimberly Ann Elliott , 83–107. Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1997 .

Miller, Seumas , Peter Roberts , and Edward Spence , Corruption and Anti‐Corruption: An Applied Philosophical Approach . New Jersey, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2005 .

Myint, U. “ Corruption: Causes, Consequences and Cures. ” Asia‐ Pacific Development Journal 7 ( 2000 ): 33–58.

Nye, Joseph S. “ Corruption and Political Development: A Cost‐Benefit Analysis. ” American Political Science Review 61 ( 1967 ): 417–427. 10.2307/1953254

Philips, Michael . “ Bribery. ” Ethics 94 ( 1984 ): 621–636. 10.1086/292580

Rose‐Ackerman, Susan.   Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences, and Reform . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999 .

———. International Handbook on the Economics of Corruption . Williston, Vt.: Edward Elgar, 2006 .

Sissener, Tone Kristin . “Anthropological Perspectives on Corruption.” Working paper. Bergen, Norway: Chr. Michelsen Institute, Development Studies and Human Rights, 2001. http://www.cmi.no/publications/2001/wp/wp2001–5.pdf .

Theobald, R.   Corruption, Development and Underdevelopment . London: The Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1990 .

Velasquez, Manuel . “Is Corruption Always Corrupt?” In Corporate Integrity and Accountability . Edited by George G. Brenkert , 148–165. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage, 2004 .

Wei, S.‐J. “ How Taxing is Corruption on International Investors? ” Review of Economics and Statistics 82 ( 2000 ): 1–11. 10.1162/003465300558533

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http://www.transparency.org

http://www.eitransparency.org

http://www.publishwhatyoupay.org

http://www.worldbank.org/anticorruption

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Bribery and corruption as ethical issues that require attention and how these issues may be addressed

Anyone that has ever read “All the King’s Men” by RP Warren (Yarbrough & Bromberg 1985; Warren 1982) will deduce that it is impossible for a person to be a mere observer of life. All actions have consequences and the “Spider Web” theory in the book suggests that all people and events are in some way interconnected and the vibrations of actions ripple to the remotest perimeter where the spider sleeps . The theory implies that ethical or unethical conduct will affect others and reflect the behaviour of our society. Mandal (2010) argues that benefits of actions in business have associated costs which are often hidden in the tolerance of unethical behaviour such as bribery. This paper will discuss the ethical issues connected to the actions of bribery and corruption and will propose solutions to address these issues.

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Robert McGee

This paper summarizes the results of 28 studies that were published between 2010 and 2020 on the ethics of bribery. The following 34 political jurisdictions are included: Argentina, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Egypt, England, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Ghana, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Mexico, New Zealand, Rwanda, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United States and Uzbekistan. It is part of a much larger project on the ethics of bribery that will be published in 2022.

Robert W. McGee, The Ethics of Bribery: An Introduction. In Robert W. McGee & Serkan Benk (Eds.), The Ethics of Bribery: Theoretical and Empirical Studies. (pp. xxx-xxx). Switzerland: Springer, forthcoming

This chapter introduces the reader to the chapters in the book, The Ethics of Bribery: Theoretical and Empirical Studies, and also briefly discusses the other publications in the ethics of bribery and ethics of tax evasion series.

Bibliography

Bribery is an ancient form of corruption. It has been present in most societies over the past few thousand years. The present bibliography lists more than 100 studies that have been done on this topic. The bibliography is subdivided into the following categories: theoretical studies, country studies, demographic studies, religious studies, summaries and other. Links to some studies are also provided.

Robert W. McGee, The Ethics of Bribery: Summaries of 24 Studies. In Robert W. McGee & Serkan Benk (Eds.), The Ethics of Bribery: Theoretical and Empirical Studies. (pp. xxx-xxx). Switzerland: Springer, 2023, forthcoming.

This chapter provides summaries for each of the 24 substantive chapters of Robert W. McGee and Serkan Benk (Eds.). (2022). The Ethics of Bribery: Theoretical and Empirical Studies. Switzerland: Springer, and provides citations to additional summaries of more studies on the ethics of bribery.

American Business Law Journal

Philip Nichols

Daniel Vojcak

This paper provides an overview of corruption and bribery by examining the relevant legal definitions, societal effects, along with international conventions and frameworks with anti-corruption purposes.

Business Ethics: A European Review

Richard Bernardi

Jaryeneh T Tarpeh

This thesis deals with corruption and moral blame. It examines the moral components that sufficiently establish moral blame, and suggests that given certain circumstances, moral actors can be without desert of moral blame for engaging in corruption. This thesis should be of significant interest; for it advances non-utilitarian moral reasons for excusing acts of corruption.

Livia Holden

Reyes Calderón

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Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — Politics — Corruption

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Essay on Corruption for Students and Children

500+ words essay on corruption.

Essay on Corruption – Corruption refers to a form of criminal activity or dishonesty. It refers to an evil act by an individual or a group. Most noteworthy, this act compromises the rights and privileges of others. Furthermore, Corruption primarily includes activities like bribery or embezzlement. However, Corruption can take place in many ways. Most probably, people in positions of authority are susceptible to Corruption. Corruption certainly reflects greedy and selfish behavior.

Methods of Corruption

First of all, Bribery is the most common method of Corruption. Bribery involves the improper use of favours and gifts in exchange for personal gain. Furthermore, the types of favours are diverse. Above all, the favours include money, gifts, company shares, sexual favours, employment , entertainment, and political benefits. Also, personal gain can be – giving preferential treatment and overlooking crime.

Embezzlement refers to the act of withholding assets for the purpose of theft. Furthermore, it takes place by one or more individuals who were entrusted with these assets. Above all, embezzlement is a type of financial fraud.

The graft is a global form of Corruption. Most noteworthy, it refers to the illegal use of a politician’s authority for personal gain. Furthermore, a popular way for the graft is misdirecting public funds for the benefit of politicians .

Extortion is another major method of Corruption. It means to obtain property, money or services illegally. Above all, this obtainment takes place by coercing individuals or organizations. Hence, Extortion is quite similar to blackmail.

Favouritism and nepotism is quite an old form of Corruption still in usage. This refers to a person favouring one’s own relatives and friends to jobs. This is certainly a very unfair practice. This is because many deserving candidates fail to get jobs.

Abuse of discretion is another method of Corruption. Here, a person misuses one’s power and authority. An example can be a judge unjustly dismissing a criminal’s case.

Finally, influence peddling is the last method here. This refers to illegally using one’s influence with the government or other authorized individuals. Furthermore, it takes place in order to obtain preferential treatment or favour.

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Ways of Stopping Corruption

One important way of preventing Corruption is to give a better salary in a government job. Many government employees receive pretty low salaries. Therefore, they resort to bribery to meet their expenses. So, government employees should receive higher salaries. Consequently, high salaries would reduce their motivation and resolve to engage in bribery.

Tough laws are very important for stopping Corruption. Above all, strict punishments need to be meted out to guilty individuals. Furthermore, there should be an efficient and quick implementation of strict laws.

Applying cameras in workplaces is an excellent way to prevent corruption. Above all, many individuals would refrain from indulging in Corruption due to fear of being caught. Furthermore, these individuals would have otherwise engaged in Corruption.

The government must make sure to keep inflation low. Due to the rise in prices, many people feel their incomes to be too low. Consequently, this increases Corruption among the masses. Businessmen raise prices to sell their stock of goods at higher prices. Furthermore, the politician supports them due to the benefits they receive.

To sum it up, Corruption is a great evil of society. This evil should be quickly eliminated from society. Corruption is the poison that has penetrated the minds of many individuals these days. Hopefully, with consistent political and social efforts, we can get rid of Corruption.

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Free Bribery And Corruption Argumentative Essay Sample

Type of paper: Argumentative Essay

Topic: Government , Corruption , Crime , Social Issues , Politics , Company , White Collar Crime , Money

Words: 1700

Published: 03/05/2020

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Bribery and corruption are two related vices that are prevalent in virtually all global societies. Bribery is defined as the act of giving or receiving something with the core intention of influencing the actions of the recipient. These actions most often than not induce the recipient to carry out illegal, dishonest or activities that breach trust in the conduct of business. Corruption on the other hand focuses on the misuse of public office, rank, or status for one’s personal gain (OCSE, 2000). Bribery and corruption happen to be impediments to both global and national development. Countries and organizations are adversely affected by these vices. The global economies experience negative growth with the World Bank estimating that at least 0.5% of GDP is lost through these vices annually. Engaging in bribery and corruption has also been ranked as one of the main causes of unfavorable business environment. It also leads to the flourishing of organized crime and the eventual undermining of the rule of law. Moreover, the two vices impair the economic development of global nations eroding public trust in institutions as well as challenging democratic principles that many countries subscribe to. The two vices, bribery and corruption, are prevalent or thrive in our societies particularly in the public sector due to various factors and circumstances. Government contracts are one of the causes of the prevalence of corruption and bribery in the public sector. These contracts involve large sums of money, which attract a sizeable number of competing applicants. This creates room for bribery and corruption to influence this tendering process in favor of individuals and organizations (Tavits, 2005). It also leads to the breach of trusts and other integrity related elements in public tenders and activities. The government benefits also enhance the prevalence of bribery and corruption in the public sector. These benefits include subsidies, pensions, favorable prices, and exchange rates. Bribes and corrupt tendencies may influence the way these benefits are allocated or extended to organizations and individuals. The generation of the government revenue may also lead to increased bribery and corruption levels in the public sector. It is prudent to note that the government generates its revenue from fees, licences, taxes, public utility charges and custom duties. All these avenues can encourage individuals and businesses to bribe or use corrupt antics to ensure they remit less to the government. The bribes for instance, may be proposed or suggested by the taxpayer or the tax collectors. Time and regulatory avoidance is the other factor that encourages bribery and corruption within the public sector. Much of the public processes are characterized by lengthy and detailed procedures. Bribes and corrupt deals can speed up these public processes such as issuance of permits and licenses. Bribery and corruption may also be enhanced when it comes to the influencing of legal and regulatory procedures. Many businesses and individuals may engage in these vices to make regulatory and legal authorities to “look the other way” (Wells & Hymes, 2012). It is important to understand that public sector corruption impact is defined through two perspectives: supply-side and demand-led corruption. The supply-side corruption covers the individuals, parties, and organizations that hand out bribes or corrupt payments not necessarily under coercion. The demand-side corruption on the other hand covers those that demand and accept bribes or corrupt payments. The two perspectives share a common similarity where both the bribe givers and recipients gain from the corrupt deal. In many instances, the supply-side corruption is usually accelerated in the public sector due to the presence of wealthy organizations and individuals. In many poor countries, wealthy multinational corporations that hail from industrialized countries may easily influence officials. Many of these poor countries may have weak legal systems that may enhance supply-side corruption. In these countries prevalent with the supply-side corruption, have leaders, senior officials, and politicians that are above the law or are immune to the criminal justice system. These loopholes are the major catalysts of the supply-side corruption. The demand-side public sector corruption is notably prevalent in the developed nations and societies (OCSE, 2000). Many of the developed countries have bureaucratic measures that can easily precipitate the demand for bribes by public officials. Those who understand the weaknesses of the system can easily exploit these inefficient bureaucracies with ease. The supply-side corruption has a great impact in many societies. It locks out genuine businesses or deserving individuals from accessing public services, tenders, and utilities. Many multinational corporations that engage in this type of corruption lock out the indigenous firms from competitively participating in their own nation’s economy and commerce. This corruption further increases the cost of engaging in business for the less financially endowed firms. The demand-side corruption on the other hand, may hinder many competent individuals or organizations from engaging with the public sector. The corrupt payment demands in this case may be too exaggerated pushing out genuine businesses and individuals from engaging rightfully in the public sector. The demand-side corruption in most instances is intricate as legal and regulatory systems are well developed. The public officials that understand the workings of the system thus charge exorbitant corruption payments that may create non-conducive environment for business and public service. Bribery and corruption has no boundaries. It is a global problem the difference is the geographical reach and cost associated with these vices. The global nations under the United Nations organization understand the negative implications of corruption hence the ratification of the UN corruption preventive measures. These measures are captured in the articles that provide for participation of societies and prevention of money laundering. The UN understands the critical role played by civil societies and the citizenry in general in keeping corruption in check. It encourages access and creation of anti-corruption bodies that are integral in the fight against corruption. This international organization understands fully the effects of money laundering. It has fostered international regulatory platforms and cooperation in managing this problem. Many regional blocs in different continents have created mechanisms to manage and prevent corruption among their members. The European Union and African Union have distinct platforms for enhancing transparency among their member states (Loughman et al., 2012). The United Kingdom and United States have continuously provided many countries with the legal and regulatory frameworks. The UK bribery act 2010 and the US FCPA act of 1977 have been instrumental in deterring corruption and bribery. The UK Bribery act of 2010 was crafted with the intent of emboldening the fight against corruption within the United Kingdom. It particularly identifies the specific criminal offence of the bribing of foreign public officials by U.K citizens and/or organizations with the intent of obtaining or retaining business. The act further provides strict guidelines to companies on preventing their employees from engaging in corrupt dealings. It also raises the jail term for bribery crimes from by three years from seven years to ten years. Companies under this act also face unlimited fine if identified to have negligently failed to prevent bribery. The United States FCPA act of 1977 covers all US companies, citizens, foreign companies based in US, foreign companies listed on the US stock exchange, and all US permanent residents and citizens anywhere in the world regardless of their employer. It prohibits indirect corrupt payments made via intermediaries or agents. It also finds companies liable if they authorize any form of payment or knew that the agent would undertake payment. The act cites that knowledge on the part of the company includes awareness of “high probability” that corrupt payment or bribe will be extended. The act also stipulates the legal fines and criminal penalties to its violators. Companies may be fined up to US$ 2million or twice the benefit. Individuals on the other hand may face fines amounting up to US$ 250,000 or imprisonment of up to five years. The two acts, the US FCPA act of 1977 and UK bribery act of 2010, have been instrumental in discouraging corruption, which is both demand-led and supply-sided. The two acts touch not only on their citizens, indigenous companies but also foreign company and officials. They also provide strict guidelines to companies that previously enjoyed their way through their corrupt employees. In short, this means corporate failure is punishable under these acts. The acts have also gone a notch higher by outlawing facilitation payments that previously provided loopholes for bribery and corruption in the respective nations (Myint, 2000). In conclusion, bribery and corruption in the public sector is a global endemic. The vices surface in both the developed and less developed nations and societies. The public sector, however, notably is characterized by circumstances that enhance bribery and corruption. These namely are government contracts, government benefits, revenue generation, time and regulatory avoidance, and legal and regulatory procedures. Corruption has also been identified through two perspectives, demand-led and supply-side. The two have adverse effects on societies and provision of public services (Loughman et al., 2012). The US FCPA act of 1977 and UK bribery act of 2010 have also been identified as the legal benchmarks for fighting corruption and bribery. The laws have been effective as they cover a broad spectrum of entities. The two acts touch not only on their citizens, indigenous companies but also foreign company and officials.

Ameresekere, N. S. (2011). UN Convention against Corruption to combat fraud & corruption: A cancerous menace : with mere rhetoric subverts UN Convention. Central Milton Keynes: AuthorHouse. Loughman, B. P., Sibery, R. A., & Ernst & Young (2012). Bribery and corruption: Navigating the global risks. Hoboken, N.J: Wiley. Myint, U. (2000) Corruption: Causes, Consequences and Cures, Asia-Pacific Development Journal,7(2). OCSE (2000). No longer business as usual: Fighting bribery and corruption. Paris: Organisation for economic co-operation and development. Tavits, M. (2005) Causes of Corruption: Testing Competing Hypotheses, Working paper, Nuffield College. Wells, J. T., & Hymes, L. (2012). Bribery and corruption casebook: The view from under the table. Hoboken, N.J: John Wiley & Sons.

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Corruption In Pakistan Essay | 500 Words & 800 Words

by Pakiology | May 21, 2024 | Essay , English | 2 comments

Page Contents

1) 500 Words Essay On Corruption In Pakistan

2) 800 words essay on corruption in pakistan, understanding corruption in pakistan, the causes of corruption in pakistan, the consequences of corruption in pakistan, the way forward: tackling corruption in pakistan.

Corruption is a pervasive problem in Pakistan that has negatively impacted the country’s economy and political stability. It is the abuse of public office for private gain, and it is a major obstacle to Pakistan’s development.

There are many causes of corruption in Pakistan, including a lack of transparency in government institutions, weak law enforcement, and a lack of accountability. In addition, corruption is often seen as a way for people to get ahead in a society that is plagued by inequality and a lack of opportunities.

One of the most prominent forms of corruption in Pakistan is corruption in the public sector. Government officials often demand bribes from citizens in order to provide them with services that they are entitled to, such as issuing licenses or permits. This not only undermines the rule of law but also discourages investment and stifles economic growth.

Another major problem in Pakistan is corruption in the private sector. Companies often bribe government officials in order to secure contracts or other favors, which can lead to inefficient and wasteful use of public resources. This not only harms the economy but also undermines public trust in the government and private institutions.

There are several factors that contribute to the high levels of corruption in Pakistan. One of the main reasons is the lack of accountability and transparency in the country’s political and economic systems. This allows corrupt individuals to operate with impunity, as they are able to conceal their activities and avoid being held accountable for their actions.

Another contributing factor is the widespread poverty in Pakistan. Many people are willing to engage in corrupt activities in order to make ends meet, as they see it as a means of surviving in a difficult economic environment.

Furthermore, corruption is often perpetuated by a lack of strong institutions and effective laws to prevent and punish it. In many cases, the government and law enforcement agencies are themselves involved in corrupt activities, which makes it difficult to address the problem.

The consequences of corruption in Pakistan are severe. It undermines the rule of law and weakens public trust in the government, leading to social and political instability. It also hinders economic development and stifles entrepreneurship, as it creates an uneven playing field for businesses and discourages investment.

In order to combat corruption in Pakistan, it is essential for the government to implement strong legal frameworks and institutional mechanisms to promote accountability and transparency. This could include measures such as stricter laws against corruption, better oversight of public officials and institutions, and improved access to information for the general public.

Additionally, there needs to be a cultural shift in the country towards greater integrity and honesty. This can be achieved through education and awareness-raising campaigns, as well as by encouraging a sense of social responsibility among the people of Pakistan.

In conclusion, corruption is a major challenge in Pakistan that needs to be addressed in order to promote economic development and political stability. By implementing effective legal frameworks and promoting a culture of integrity, it is possible to combat corruption and build a more just and prosperous society.

Pakistan, a country known for its rich cultural heritage, is facing numerous challenges in its journey toward becoming a developed nation. One of the most persistent and widespread issues that the country has been grappling with is corruption. Corruption in Pakistan has reached a level where it is not only hampering the economic growth of the country but also undermining the social and political fabric.

Corruption can be defined as the abuse of power or position for personal gain. It takes many forms, from bribery and embezzlement to nepotism and fraud. In Pakistan, corruption has permeated all levels of society, from the lowest echelons to the highest. It has become so widespread that it is now considered a norm in the country.

There are several factors that have contributed to the high levels of corruption in Pakistan. Some of the major causes include:

Lack of effective government institutions:

The government institutions in Pakistan are not strong enough to prevent corruption. There is a lack of accountability and transparency in the workings of these institutions, making it easier for corrupt officials to carry out their activities without fear of consequences.

Political instability:

Political instability has been a constant in Pakistan’s history, which has contributed to widespread corruption in the country. When political leaders are more focused on retaining power and advancing their own interests, they are less likely to prioritize the fight against corruption.

Poverty and income inequality:

Poverty and income inequality are also contributing factors to corruption in Pakistan. When people are struggling to make ends meet, they may be more likely to engage in corrupt activities to earn extra income.

Weak rule of law:

The weak rule of law in Pakistan has also contributed to the high levels of corruption in the country. When laws are not enforced and the justice system is unable to hold corrupt officials accountable, it is easier for corruption to thrive.

The consequences of corruption in Pakistan are far-reaching and damaging. Some of the major consequences include:

Hampering economic growth:

Corruption has a significant impact on the economy of the country. It undermines investment and creates an environment that is hostile to business. This leads to lower economic growth, less job creation, and decreased prosperity for the people of Pakistan.

Undermining social and political fabric:

Corruption not only undermines the economy but also the social and political fabric of the country. When people lose faith in the government and its institutions, it creates a void that can be filled by extremist and extremist ideologies.

Impeding development:

Corruption also impedes development by diverting resources away from areas that need them most. When public funds are misused or stolen, it means that schools, hospitals, and other public services are not receiving the support they need to provide quality services to the people.

Discouraging foreign investment:

Corruption can also discourage foreign investment, as investors are less likely to invest in a country where they perceive a high risk of corruption. This means that the country misses out on the benefits of foreign investment, such as job creation and economic growth.

Tackling corruption in Pakistan will require a multi-faceted approach that involves the government, civil society, and the private sector. Some of the measures that could be taken include:

Strengthening government institutions:

The government must take steps to strengthen its institutions and make them more accountable and transparent. This can be done by implementing effective anti-corruption measures, such as setting up independent watchdog agencies and increasing transparency in the workings of government institutions.

Improving the rule of law:

The government must also work to improve the rule of law in the country, by enforcing laws and regulations that prevent corruption, and by ensuring that corrupt officials are held accountable.

Encouraging civil society engagement:

Civil society can play an important role in tackling corruption in Pakistan, by raising awareness about the issue, advocating for reforms, and monitoring government activities.

Promoting ethics and integrity:

The private sector can also play a role by promoting ethics and integrity in their own operations, and by supporting anti-corruption initiatives.

Increasing transparency and accountability:

The government must also take steps to increase transparency and accountability in its operations, by making its activities more open and accessible to the public.

Providing education and training:

The government can provide education and training to its citizens, particularly the youth, on the dangers and consequences of corruption, and on the importance of integrity and ethical behavior.

In conclusion, corruption in Pakistan is a major barrier to development, and it is essential that the government, civil society, and private sector work together to tackle this issue. While there is no easy solution to corruption, the steps outlined above, if implemented effectively, can help to reduce corruption and create a more prosperous and just society in Pakistan.

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59% of SMEs and their advisers globally believe that standing up to bribery and corruption will result in lost business opportunities

New research from ACCA reveals extent of concern over impact of bribery and corruption on SMEs

A new ACCA report, Bribery and corruption: The hidden social evil on your doorstep, delves into the true extent of how bribery and corruption impacts SMEs across the world, highlighting the pressing need for enhanced transparency and robust regulatory frameworks.

The research shows a high prevalence and deep concerns about the damaging impact of bribery and corruption on SMEs, with 59% of SMEs and their advisers believing that standing up to bribery and corruption will cost them business trade or opportunities.

But the survey also reveals a strong understanding of the benefits of standing up to bribery and corruption. 77% agree that having a strong anti-bribery policy boosts customer confidence in their business, and 68% say it increases their chances of getting lucrative contracts with big businesses and public sector bodies.

Jason Piper, ACCA’s Head of Tax and Business Law, said: ‘Corruption is a poison; it distorts markets, stunts economic growth, and deters investment. 

‘Many very small businesses don’t have the bargaining power to refuse when small bribes are demanded of them. Entrepreneurs have to choose between paying the bribe or losing the business – and often that is no choice at all for someone trying to support a family.’

‘Our report aims to arm businesses and regulators with the necessary insights and tools to root out corruption and foster an environment of transparency and trust. This could include the use of the latest digital tools. Just as technology is being used by criminals, so regulators and enforcement agencies should embrace it in the battle to detect, prevent and respond to them.’

Drawing from a broad spectrum of global data, expert opinions, and real-world case studies, the report explores the multifaceted impacts of corrupt practices on SMEs and economic development. It highlights the severe consequences that businesses can face, including legal penalties and severe damage to their reputations.

The report also considers the effectiveness of current anti-corruption laws and policies across different countries, suggesting that while some progress has been made, much remains to be done to align international efforts.

Piper added: ‘As global markets become increasingly interconnected, the imperative for accountability and ethical business practices becomes more pronounced.’ 

ACCA hopes this report will serve as a catalyst for change, encouraging entities across all sectors to evaluate their practices and align with the best standards of business conduct. 

The report is recommended for business leaders, policymakers, and regulatory bodies worldwide committed to uprooting corruption and fostering a fairer business environment. Read it here .

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Businesses worry about bribery and corruption

Small and midsized business owners and their financial advisors have deep concerns about the damaging impact of bribery and corruption, according to a new survey.

report , which was released Wednesday by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants.

Among accountants who work in or with small or midsized enterprises, support for relaxing rules on small bribes outweighs opposition, and among those without professional qualifications the support is even higher. SMEs are concerned about bribery, and they're likely to encounter it, but they're also more likely to cover it up if they do get involved.

However, the survey also showed a strong understanding of the benefits of standing up to bribery and corruption, with more than three-fourths (77%) of respondents agreeing that having a strong anti-bribery policy boosts customer confidence in their business, and over two-thirds (68%) saying it increases their chances of getting lucrative contracts with big businesses and public sector bodies.

While the survey respondents were mostly confident they could identify bribery, confidence has declined globally since 2019, when the ACCA conducted a similar survey.

"Corruption is a poison; it distorts markets, stunts economic growth, and deters investment," said ACCA North America head Jillian Couse in a statement Wednesday. "This survey has some stark findings when looking at the global landscape, where a majority of respondents say corruption is bad for business, yet 59% say that businesses are likely to encounter it." 

The report discusses the effectiveness of anti-corruption laws and policies in various countries, acknowledging that while some progress has been made, more needs to be done to align international efforts. The ACCA hopes the report will provide a catalyst for change and is encouraging groups across all sectors to evaluate their practices and adopt better standards for business conduct. 

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Some sports leaders are trying to defy term limits – which can open the door to corruption

Lecturer in Sport Management, Deakin University

Senior Lecturer in Sport Management, Deakin University

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The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Deakin University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Being a sport administrator comes with many perks, so it’s no surprise many want to stay in their positions as long as possible.

Recently, a trend has emerged whereby leaders in sport are seeking to extend or eliminate term limits (rules that restrict how long people can serve), raising serious questions about governance standards.

Several leading sport bodies have been involved. The Asian Football Confederation last week voted to remove term limits for its president and council members.

This followed reports the International Olympics Commitee (IOC) is considering amendments to allow Thomas Bach to serve beyond a 12-year limit.

The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) attracted attention when Aleksandar Čeferin pushed rule changes that would extend his tenure as president, although he ultimately decided to step down.

This trend raises two key questions: why should we care about term limits in sport? And how long is too long for sport administrators?

Why do we need term limits in sport?

The debate over term limits is ancient. Around 500BC, the Republic of Athens imposed a limit of two one-year terms for members of its ruling council. The Romans were even stricter, with a maximum one-year term .

The arguments for term limits back then were much the same then as they are for sport bodies today.

Simply put, term limits mitigate the risk of one individual accumulating an excessive concentration of power – the longer a leader remains in a position, the more power they accumulate.

This happens because over time, they can solidify control over resources and establish deeper connections within influential networks. In turn, this increases their influence over decision-making, leading to a cycle in which power reinforces itself.

Term limits, then, help to ensure power is more evenly distributed. They also offer a safeguard from leaders who could misuse their power indefinitely.

Take the case of Jack Warner, who in 1990 was elected president of the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF). Warner served for 21 years, and his tenure was marred by allegations of corruption .

A 2013 report by CONCACAF’s Integrity Committee concluded Warner had committed fraud against both CONCACAF and FIFA. Amid the 2015 FIFA corruption crisis, FIFA’s Ethics Committee banned Warner from football for life, and US prosecutors charged him with 12 offences, including racketeering and bribery .

Warner denies the charges, and the US Supreme Court recently threw the case out on the basis of jurisdictional overreach .

However, the controversies surrounding Warner have been highly damaging to CONCACAF and FIFA. Had term limits been in place, the damage may not have been so severe.

Incumbency advantage

The longer an administrator stays in power, the more they can potentially benefit from “incumbency advantage”. This describes how long-serving leaders can use their powers (such as promises of funding) to build a critical mass of support within key voting blocs.

Such manoeuvring can make elections almost ceremonial, as it becomes exceedingly difficult for challengers to pose a real threat to the incumbent’s position. Without maximum term limits, leaders effectively become life presidents or quasi-monarchs.

Again, this all might sound familiar to anyone who follows international football.

In no organisation has incumbency advantage been more pronounced than in FIFA, football’s world governing body. Longtime former president Sepp Blatter was allegedly adept at using the development funding at his disposal to guarantee his re-election.

With all 211 national football associations having an equal vote in the FIFA presidential elections, Blatter strategically garnered support across select regions, including Africa and the Caribbean, to ensure his continued leadership. While this political manoeuvring was not illegal, it created a system where it was extremely difficult to remove him through an election.

Since its formation in 1904, FIFA has had nine presidents (excluding interims). Only once has an incumbent lost an election. The winner of that election was Joao Havelange, who according to Swiss court documents, accepted millions in bribes during his presidency . Two presidents were impeached and resigned, while two voluntarily stepped down. Three died in office .

While rules introduced after the 2015 FIFA corruption crisis mean current FIFA president Gianni Infantino cannot remain in office beyond 2031, with the advantages of incumbency, he has easily navigated prior elections , and is highly unlikely to ever lose one.

The case against

There are, however, legitimate downsides to term limits. The most obvious is potential loss of experienced, highly competent leaders. Frequent turnover can also lead to instability.

This is the argument presented by IOC members regarding Bach. Between global conflicts and dwindling interest in the Olympics, they think the organisation is facing particularly tough times. From their perspective , stability and experienced leadership are paramount.

Term limits may also discourage long-term planning, with self-interested leaders opting to prioritise quick gains. Political science studies have validated this theory. Research shows shorter governmental tenures are associated with larger fiscal deficits and a neglect of long-term investments .

Despite this, consensus among experts is the benefits of implementing term limits dramatically outweigh the potential disadvantages.

This is especially true in sport, a sector with prestige and status. In such an environment, people are particularly inclined to stay involved.

How long is too long?

So if term limits are generally accepted as good governance practice, what exactly should that limit be?

This question is far from an exact science, and there is considerable variety in the extent and form of term limits across sport.

Our recent research on sport governance in Victoria highlights this variety.

The graph below displays the frequency of different term limit formats used in the 40 Victorian state sport organisations we studied. The size of the red dot indicates frequency.

As shown, a term of three years with a maximum of three terms is the most common model, adopted by 14 organisations.

In our experience working with these organisations, the optimal term limit is depends on the nature of the organisation, with smaller sports often requiring more flexibility due to limited interest in volunteer positions.

For larger organisations, three-year terms are most common, but arguably four-year terms better align with strategic planning and Olympic cycles.

Whether it is eight or 12 years, or somewhere in between, term limits are a cornerstone of good governance and it is essential to protect them from further erosion or being abolished altogether.

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Impact of bribery on SMEs: Standing up to corruption will cost business opportunities, says survey

While strong policies and public positions against bribery and corruption would cost the business trade or opportunities, a number of respondents said it may be the right thing to do and have benefits for businesses.

A new global survey by the UK-based Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) understanding the impact of bribery and corruption on SMEs across the world noted that 59 per cent of SMEs and their advisers believed standing up to bribery and corruption will cost them business trade or opportunities.

According to the survey, over three-quarters (77 per cent) of respondents thought such policies would increase customer confidence, and 68 per cent believed it would increase the likelihood of being able to trade with large businesses or public bodies.

“Many very small businesses don’t have the bargaining power to refuse when small bribes are demanded of them. Entrepreneurs have to choose between paying the bribe or losing the business – and often that is no choice at all for someone trying to support a family,” said Jason Piper, ACCA’s Head of Tax and Business Law. ACCA has over 2.47 lakh members in 181 countries.

Since SMEs don’t have a ‘culture’ like big employers, and they don’t have reporting lines and management structures – they are built on personal relationships and daily contact between partners, employees and owners. “That can make it harder for people to recognise when things start going bad and, by the time it’s become obvious, it’s even harder to do anything about it.” the survey said. 

49.8 per cent of respondents added that bribery and corruption have a negative impact on the business environment and 66 per cent see it as a concern.  

The findings also revealed that awareness and effectiveness of anti-bribery legislation are generally felt to be high – but so are the costs, in direct financial terms and also among SMEs themselves in terms of lost opportunities to trade internationally. 

48 per cent of respondents agreed that compliance with local anti-bribery laws has added to SMEs’ costs. 

“The implications for small businesses that get caught up in bribery can be significant – often even more so than for major multinationals. Small businesses don’t have buffers of ready cash or assets against which they can borrow. Every dollar, euro or yen spent on bribes is money taken out of profits that would be spent on supporting the local economy – or worse yet, it’s money taken from the business itself, stunting investment and growth,” the survey said.

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Fat Leonard bribery cases fall apart because of prosecution blunders

One Navy officer confessed to leaking military secrets for $105,000 in bribes and prostitutes. But instead of going to prison, he may avoid punishment for his crimes.

Few Navy officers entangled themselves in the Fat Leonard corruption scandal more than Steve Shedd. In court documents and testimony, the former warship captain confessed to leaking military secrets on 10 occasions for prostitutes, vacations, luxury watches and other bribes worth $105,000.

On the witness stand in a related case in 2022, Shedd also admitted that he had lied repeatedly to federal agents and betrayed his oath to defend the Constitution.

“You’re a traitor to the United States, aren’t you?” attorney Joseph Mancano asked the Naval Academy graduate.

“Yes, sir,” Shedd replied, acknowledging that he was “a disgrace” who “deserves prison.”

Yet because of mistakes by the Justice Department, Shedd might avoid punishment for his crimes.

Two years ago, Shedd pleaded guilty to bribery and conspiracy charges for taking payoffs from Leonard Glenn Francis, a 350-pound Malaysian defense contractor known as Fat Leonard. Under terms of his plea deal, Shedd agreed to pay the government $105,000 in restitution and faced a maximum of 20 years in prison.

On Tuesday, Justice Department officials are scheduled to ask U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino in San Diego to dismiss the entire case against Shedd. The reason: a pattern of prosecutorial misconduct in the Fat Leonard investigation that has caused several cases to unravel so far and is threatening to undermine more.

Shedd’s attorneys declined to comment but have filed legal briefs supporting the dismissal.

In addition to Shedd’s case, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of California are proposing throwing out the felony guilty pleas of three other retired Navy officers and one retired Marine colonel who admitted pocketing bribes from Francis. If the judge approves, they’ll be allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanors instead, with no prison time.

The cases collapsed after defense attorneys alleged that prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego relied on flawed evidence and withheld information favorable to the defense during the 2022 bribery trial of five other officers who had served in the Navy’s 7th Fleet in Asia. Each was accused of accepting extravagant meals and gifts from Francis, whose maritime-services company once held $200 million in federal contracts to resupply Navy ships in ports throughout the Western Pacific.

Though a jury found four of those defendants guilty, Sammartino vacated their felony convictions in September and lambasted prosecutors for “flagrant and outrageous” misconduct.

The striking reversals have given the Justice Department a black eye and undermined the quest for accountability in the most extensive corruption case in U.S. military history. After Francis’s arrest in 2013, nearly 1,000 individuals came under scrutiny, including 91 admirals . Federal prosecutors brought criminal charges against 34 defendants. Twenty-nine of them, including Shedd, pleaded guilty.

In a court filing in April, a new set of prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego acknowledged “serious issues” with its handling of the 2022 trial and said they are reviewing more closed cases to determine whether other defendants “merit relief.”

The prosecutors did not specify how many cases might be reopened. Besides the five cases being heard in court this week, as many as two dozen additional defendants could be affected.

Most have already completed their prison terms, but the Justice Department could ask the judge to erase their felony records or allow them to plead guilty to lesser charges.

“It potentially could taint almost everything,” said Rachel VanLandingham, a law professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles who has followed the case. “It is going to be really interesting to see if the wheels come off for the entire train.”

She said the Justice Department has a duty to hold itself accountable for its errors and to treat defendants fairly, even if that lets offenders off the hook for what she called the “most extensive, tawdry and ethically problematic scandal” in the 248-year history of the Navy.

“We can’t afford a criminal justice system that cuts corners,” she said. “It does mean that [sometimes] individuals go free even when they’re guilty as hell.”

Kelly Thornton, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego, declined to comment.

Legal analysts said it is possible that even Francis might catch a break, though he has already pleaded guilty to bribing “scores” of military officers and defrauding the Navy of tens of millions of dollars. He is being held in a San Diego jail while he awaits sentencing. His attorney, William Sprague, did not respond to emails seeking comment.

“I can guarantee you that every defense lawyer is talking to their client, trying to figure out how to move forward,” said Sara Kropf, a trial lawyer in D.C. who is not involved in the case but has monitored the proceedings. “I’d call the prosecution and say, ‘Can we work something out?’”

During the 2022 trial, subsequent court filings show, the prosecution team led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Pletcher withheld a witness statement that contradicted some of the government’s allegations and did not divulge that one of its lead investigators had made inaccurate statements in another case.

Defense attorneys also accused prosecutors of concealing how Francis received cushy privileges — including gourmet meals and manicures and pedicures — while he was a prisoner during secret debriefings at the U.S. attorney’s office. The debriefings occurred as part of a cooperation agreement that Francis reached with the Justice Department to provide evidence against hundreds of Navy officers.

Pletcher and other members of his prosecution team have since been reassigned from the case. One of the defense attorneys involved in the trial filed a complaint against Pletcher with the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility in August 2022, alleging that he willfully concealed evidence favorable to the defense.

In March 2023, a Justice Department official responded in writing, saying the office had “carefully reviewed” the complaint but closed the inquiry after determining that “further investigation was unlikely to result in a finding” that Pletcher intentionally violated any rules or acted “with reckless disregard.”

Pletcher did not respond to a request for comment.

Shedd and the four other defendants seeking leniency pleaded guilty before the start of the 2022 trial that became marred by misconduct. But in court filings, prosecutors said it would be unfair to punish them more harshly than the Navy officers whose felony convictions were thrown out.

“These defendants accepted responsibility for their crimes and cooperated, some extensively,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Ko wrote in a brief last month. Yet, he added, “they inequitably face much harsher outcomes than their immediate co-conspirators who did not accept responsibility, did not cooperate, and opted for trial.”

Shedd was the only one who testified as a prosecution witness at the 2022 trial, which is why prosecutors say he deserved to have all charges against him dismissed. In a legal brief, his attorneys called him a “critical” government witness, noting that “he was required to, for the very public record, lay bare personal failings.”

Besides Shedd, the four others seeking to withdraw their felony guilty pleas are retired Navy Capt. Donald Hornbeck, Cmdr. Jose Luis Sanchez, Chief Warrant Officer Robert Gorsuch and Marine Col. Enrico DeGuzman.

Under terms of their new arrangement with the Justice Department, each would plead instead to a single misdemeanor charge of improperly disclosing government information. All formerly served on the staff of the Navy’s 7th Fleet, which oversees U.S. maritime operations in the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean.

Sanchez, a logistics officer, had originally pleaded guilty in January 2015 to bribery and conspiracy to commit bribery. In doing so, he admitted leaking classified information to Francis on seven occasions between 2009 and 2011.

In return for serving as the Malaysian businessman’s paid informant, Sanchez acknowledged receiving prostitutes, swanky meals, free travel and other bribes worth between $30,000 and $120,000. Emails and text messages show that he addressed Francis as “Boss.” His attorney, Vincent Ward, declined to comment.

Gorsuch served as the flag administration officer to the three-star admiral in charge of the 7th Fleet from 2005 to 2008. In August 2021, he pleaded guilty to pocketing $45,000 worth of meals, hotel rooms and other gifts from Francis. He also admitted that he leaked military secrets.

Francis told federal agents that Gorsuch once escorted him onto the U.S. Navy base in Yokosuka, Japan, and handed him two disks containing classified ship schedules. “No worries about helping you out — any time my friend,” Gorsuch emailed Francis afterward, according to a copy of the message. “It was my pleasure.”

Gorsuch’s attorney, Frederick Carroll, did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Hornbeck served as the 7th Fleet’s assistant chief of staff for operations from 2005 to 2007. He pleaded guilty to a bribery charge in February 2022 and admitted accepting prostitutes, meals and other gifts worth at least $67,000. Francis told federal agents that he nicknamed Hornbeck “Bubbles” because he drank so much champagne, documents show. Hornbeck’s attorney, Benjamin Cheeks, did not respond to emails seeking comment.

DeGuzman, a Marine, served as a senior officer on the 7th Fleet staff from 2004 to 2007. He pleaded guilty to a bribery charge in September 2021, admitting that he had taken meals, hotel rooms and other gifts worth at least $67,000. His attorney, Hamilton Arendsen, did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Robert Menendez ‘Put His Power Up For Sale,’ Prosecutors Say in Senator’s Trial

The corruption trial of the New Jersey senator began on Wednesday with prosecutors describing a bribery scheme. The defense said he “was doing his job, and he was doing it right.”

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Nicholas Fandos

Here are 5 takeaways from the opening statements in Robert Menendez’s corruption trial.

The corruption trial of Senator Robert Menendez , a powerful New Jersey Democrat, spun into motion in Manhattan on Wednesday, with combative opening statements and an extraordinary claim by the defense.

Speaking directly to the jury, a U.S. prosecutor asserted that Mr. Menendez “put his power up for sale,” trading favors involving Egypt and New Jersey businessmen for gold bars, cash and a Mercedes-Benz convertible. But it was a lawyer for Mr. Menendez who shook the courtroom awake, piling blame on the senator’s wife, Nadine Menendez.

Mr. Menendez, 70, betrayed little emotion as he watched the opening statements from the courtroom, where he is facing some of the gravest charges ever leveled against a sitting U.S. senator. He has pleaded not guilty.

He is being tried alongside two of the businessmen, Fred Daibes and Wael Hana. Prosecutors have also charged Ms. Menendez, but her trial was delayed until July for health reasons.

Here are five takeaways from the senator’s third day on trial:

The prosecution tried to keep it simple.

Prosecutors have spun a dizzying set of accusations against Mr. Menendez, filing four rounds of charges that involve a halal meat monopoly, a Qatari sheikh and the inner workings of the U.S. government. All of it could easily confuse jurors.

So laying out a road map for their case, they offered the panel a far simpler view: “This case is about a public official who put greed first,” said Lara Pomerantz, an assistant U.S. attorney. “A public official who put his own interests above the duty of the people, who put his power up for sale.”

What the jury needed to understand, she insisted, was that favors were granted by Mr. Menendez, including a letter ghost written to help Egypt and calls to pressure important government officials. In exchange, the couple amassed hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, bars of gold and much more, with Ms. Menendez as a “go-between.”

Who Are Key Players in the Menendez Case?

Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, and his wife, Nadine Menendez, are accused of taking part in a wide-ranging, international bribery scheme that lasted five years. Take a closer look at central figures related to the case.

The defense: A tale of two Menendezes.

Mr. Menendez’s lawyer, Avi Weitzman, used his first words to the jury to flatly deny that arrangement. But the heart of his defense was a head-turning proposition: Do not confuse the senator with his wife.

Mr. Menendez, his lawyer said, was “an American patriot,” the son of working-class immigrants who made it to Congress. All those instances of Mr. Menendez purportedly abusing his office to help a foreign power or New Jersey businessmen? They showed a senator “doing his job,” Mr. Weitzman said, asserting that the government had found no record of Mr. Menendez negotiating bribes.

He did not say the same of Ms. Menendez, who had come late into the senator’s life and concealed her financial burdens and communications from him, according to the lawyer. Mr. Weitzman did not outright say that Ms. Menendez accepted bribes. But if she did, he wanted to make it clear that his client did not know “what she was asking others to give her” — especially all that gold.

The gold was hidden in a closet.

To make his point, Mr. Weitzman displayed photographs of a closet that he said belonged to Ms. Menendez. It was there, in her private quarters, he disclosed, that the F.B.I. found the gold bars and cash with Mr. Daibes’ fingerprints.

The senator did know that his wife had some gold, but assumed it was from her wealthy family of Persian rug dealers, the lawyer said. When Mr. Menendez repeatedly searched for the price of gold on Google, the lawyer said, he was looking to see how much money Ms. Menendez could generate from that family gift — not to cash out a bribe.

“He did not know of the gold bars that existed in that closet,” he said.

Likewise, Mr. Weitzman said Mr. Menendez had been in the dark about how Ms. Menendez got the funds to purchase a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible. In a guilty plea, another New Jersey businessman admitted that he gave Ms. Menendez the car “in return for influencing a United States senator to stop a criminal investigation.”

The high stakes trial is being overshadowed. Blame Trump.

The case against Mr. Menendez could hardly be more serious. It has already made history: Mr. Menendez is the first senator to be indicted in more than one bribery case. (The first ended in a mistrial in 2017.)

But as his trial opened this week in Lower Manhattan, it was hard to escape the conclusion that it was being overshadowed by the state courthouse just a few hundred yards away. That is where, thanks to a quirk of timing, former President Donald J. Trump is in the midst of his hush-money trial .

The first ever trial of a former president has inspired wall-to-wall cable news coverage. Unlike the Menendez case, it includes nationally known witnesses, like Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen. And it has attracted a parade of high-profile visitors to buck up Mr. Trump, including the speaker of the House.

All of it is probably good news for Mr. Menendez and his party, which is vulnerable to political attacks after allowing him to continue serving in the Senate under indictment.

Expect a long trial. That’s not good for Senate Democrats.

The case has proceeded unusually quickly since the government first brought charges in September 2023. As for the trial, do not expect a verdict anytime soon.

Prosecutors have said they may take as many as six weeks to lay out the tangled web of corruption they say surrounded Mr. Menendez. When Judge Sidney H. Stein read a list of dozens of potential witnesses (including several sitting senators), he informed jurors they would be likely to hear testimony in Spanish and Arabic.

The defense has indicated it will then take another one to two weeks, setting up a verdict sometime around July 4. Except for odd days off, Mr. Menendez will be stuck in the courtroom the whole time, depriving Democrats of a key vote in the Senate, where they control a spare 51-to-49 majority.

Maria Cramer and Maia Coleman contributed reporting.

Maria Cramer

Menendez was ‘doing his job,’ his lawyer says.

When Senator Robert Menendez reached out to the New Jersey attorney general about an investigation into Latino truckers, he was looking into concerns of discrimination, his lawyer, Avi Weitzman, said.

When he pressed for Egypt to get additional aid and weapons from the United States, he was engaging in diplomacy, Mr. Weitzman said.

And when a real estate developer, Fred Daibes, asked for help with a stalled project, the senator acted on behalf of a constituent, Mr. Weitzman said during opening statements on Wednesday at the beginning of the New Jersey Democrat’s corruption trial.

“In short, the evidence will show Bob was doing his job and he was doing it right,” Mr. Weitzman told the jury.

In an opening that lasted more than an hour, Weitzman referred to the senator as “Bob,” describing him as a dedicated legislator and “American patriot” who was not taking bribes but doing the everyday job of a legislator.

Mr. Weitzman, in a telling moment that indicated how the defense would present its case to the jury, said that Mr. Menendez had no idea that the gold bars found in his wife’s closet had come from Mr. Daibes.

Ms. Menendez is being tried separately in July. She is accused of acting as a go-between for Mr. Menendez, Egyptian intelligence officials and businessmen, including Mr. Daibes, who were seeking political favors from the senator.

But Mr. Weitzman said that Ms. Menendez had financial troubles she was trying to keep from her husband. Her dealings with New Jersey businessmen like Mr. Daibes had nothing to do with Mr. Menendez, Mr. Weitzman said.

Mr. Weitzman suggested that it was easy for Ms. Menendez to keep her husband in the dark about her “financial challenges.”

The senator and his wife kept separate lives — not even sharing a phone plan — and the senator adored Ms. Menendez, whom he found “dazzling” and began dating in 2018, Mr. Weitzman said.

She was beautiful, tall and spoke four languages, Mr. Weitzman said: “Bob fell for her.”

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Tracey Tully

Menendez was a senator ‘on the take,’ prosecutors said.

In her opening statement, Lara Pomerantz, an assistant U.S. attorney, used short sentences and relatable language to guide jurors through the complicated framework of the bribery charges against Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey.

She accused Mr. Menendez of being as corrupt as he was powerful.

“This was not politics as usual,” Ms. Pomerantz said of Mr. Menendez, a Democrat who until last year led the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “This was politics for profit. This was a United States senator on the take.”

More than once she turned and gestured toward Mr. Menendez, who was seated behind her, flanked by his lawyers.

Mr. Menendez, 70, leaned forward attentively, but showed no obvious emotion, his hand at times resting on his chin and over his mouth.

Prosecutors have charged Mr. Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, with a multifaceted bribery scheme that lasted from 2018 to 2023. The senator, Ms. Pomerantz told jurors, steered aid to Egypt — a country she said “was hungry” for American support. He meddled in criminal cases involving businessmen in New Jersey, Ms. Pomerantz said.

And, with Mr. Menendez’s backing, the government of Egypt “dropped a lucrative monopoly” in the lap of friend, who, she said, had no experience in the industry.

In exchange, the senator was given bribes of gold bars, cash and a luxury car, she said.

“For years,” Ms. Pomerantz said, “Robert Menendez betrayed the people he was supposed to serve by taking bribes.”

If these opening arguments are any indication of the trial ahead, it is going to be long, complex and fascinating. We already got privileged looks into the inner workings of government and the private life of one of the nation’s most powerful elected officials.

So that concludes a very lively day of opening statements. The government leveled major charges at Senator Menendez, asserting that he “put his power up for sale.” His lawyer denied the senator ever accepted a bribe and pinned blame on his wife, Nadine Menendez.

The trial returns from a break, but Judge Stein unexpectedly calls it a day. Lawyers for Wael Hana and Fred Daibes still have to deliver opening statements, and the parties agreed to pick them up tomorrow.

Judge Stein now lectures Weitzman, who tried to mention his twin and his grandparents who survived the Holocaust to connect their tales with Menendez’s troubles. “Your personal story is not for this jury,” Judge Stein says.

After a little more than an hour, the opening statement from Senator Menendez’s defense team has wrapped. Jurors will hear next from lawyers for his co-defendants, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes. But first, Judge Stein says the court will take a brief break.

Weitzman has gone on for more than an hour in his opening statement, prompting Judge Stein to ask how much longer he has to go. “A page and a half,” Weitzman replies. “You have a man’s lifetime of public service in your hands,” he says. He tells the jury the case will affect Menendez for the rest of his life, prompting an objection from prosecutors. Judge Stein sustains it and explains to the jury that they are not to worry about punishment. That’s his job.

The trial has now veered into a history lesson on the development of New Jersey’s waterfront across the Hudson River from New York City. Prosecutors say Menendez intervened with Qatar to help Daibes land a major investment in a real estate project on the waterfront, but Weitzman is disputing that Menendez played any improper role. He said the senator was merely carrying out normal foreign policy and his actions had no effect on the investment.

Maia Coleman

This is the second time Menendez faces federal corruption charges.

Wednesday was the first day of the federal corruption trial against Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, but the sight of Mr. Menendez at the defense table likely evoked images of an earlier court proceeding: Mr. Menendez’s 2017 corruption trial.

Long before Donald J. Trump became the first former U.S. president to be criminally prosecuted, Mr. Menendez, a Democrat, made history as the first sitting U.S. senator in 36 years to face a federal bribery trial over what prosecutors described as a scheme to trade political favors for lavish gifts.

Mr. Menendez was accused in 2015 of doing favors for a friend, Dr. Salomon Melgen, a wealthy eye doctor from Florida, in exchange for gifts, including rides on a private plane, and political donations. He was charged with 12 counts of corruption, including six counts of bribery and three counts of honest services fraud. Dr. Melgen was also accused in the case and tried alongside Mr. Menendez.

The trial, which lasted more than two months in late 2017, centered on whether Mr. Menendez’s friendship with Dr. Melgen had crossed a legal line, raising questions about intent, friendship and official government acts.

Closely watched in Washington for its implications on political donations, the trial in Newark saw appearances from several high-profile figures, including Senator Cory Booker, another New Jersey Democrat, and Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, both of whom testified as character witnesses for Mr. Menendez.

During closing arguments , Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Mr. Menendez, called the charges “a lot of hooey over nothing,” saying that there was “a Grand Canyon” between the evidence presented and the accusations leveled against the senator. Peter Koski, the lead prosecutor, in his closing statements rebutted: “Friendship and bribery can coexist, ladies and gentlemen.”

After less than two weeks of deliberations, jurors said they were unable to reach a verdict, leaving the presiding judge, William H. Walls, to declare a mistrial . One juror told reporters afterward that 10 of the 12 jurors had supported finding Mr. Menendez not guilty.

In January 2018, prosecutors announced that they intended to retry Mr. Menendez , but less than a week later, Judge Walls acquitted Mr. Menendez and Dr. Melgen of seven of the 18 charges they faced.

The Justice Department dismissed all the remaining charges against the senator a few days later, leaving Mr. Menendez free to return to Congress and begin campaigning for re-election.

Weitzman is describing Menendez’s actions as those of a concerned legislator who had gotten complaints from constituents about unfair treatment. He went to New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal about the state’s investigation into Latino truckers working for Jose Uribe because he worried there was discrimination involved, Weitzman said.

He went to Philip R. Sellinger, the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, about an investigation into Fred Daibes because he was concerned about a conflict of interest: Sellinger was involved personally in a separate lawsuit involving Daibes, Weitzman said. “Bob acted lawfully, appropriately and entirely for the benefit of New Jerseyans,” Weitzman said.

Avi Weitzman, the lawyer for Menendez, has been speaking for about an hour now. He has just turned to the final facet of the government’s case: The charge that Senator Menendez tried to install a favorable U.S. attorney in New Jersey to help protect Fred Daibes in exchange for bribes. Weitzman again says there was no bribe, and that Menendez was merely doing due diligence because he worried one of the candidates for the prosecutor post would not be fair.

Weitzman is now discussing the $60,000 Mercedez-Benz that one of the New Jersey businessmen has confessed to buying Nadine Menendez as a bribe. The lawyer says that the senator initially assumed she had bought it herself.

Judge Stein just gently chastised Weitzman for his presentation: “Stick to the evidence sir, not the sermonizing.”

The defense is deep into the weeds now, underscoring just how tangled aspects of this case are. Weitzman is confirming that Menendez contacted a U.S.D.A. official about a halal meat monopoly run by the Egyptian-American businessman accused of bribing him. But the lawyer says he will present evidence showing that the call was all above board.

If you’re just joining us, Avi Weitzman, the lawyer for Menendez, is giving his opening statement. He is delving into the government’s allegation that Menendez helped Wael Hana, a friend of his wife, get a monopoly on certifying Halal meat imported into Egypt from the United States. But it’s Egyptian officials who decide who gets that business, not a U.S. senator, Weitzman said. “For whatever reason” the Egyptian government chose Hana’s business, Weitzman said.

Weitzman says there is plenty of evidence to contradict the charge that Menendez was acting as a foreign agent. For example, at the same time that he was supposedly taking bribes to help Egyptian officials, Menendez was publicly “taking them to task and he is telling them that they need to do better on human rights,” Weitzman says.

Senator Menendez’s lawyer, Avi Weitzman, is now pivoting. He is explaining to the jury that many of the senator’s actions in the case amount to “constituent services” carried out in the interests of the people of New Jersey. He is preparing to explain that Menendez was simply trying to help some of those constituents — like Daibes and Uribe — right a wrong.

Weitzman adds that there is nothing criminal about helping constituents who are also friends of his or his wife. “You may not like it, but it’s not illegal,” he said.

In Washington, will the Menendez scandal elicit more than a shrug?

Senator Robert Menendez is facing some of the most serious charges ever leveled against a sitting American lawmaker. But as he goes on trial in Manhattan this week, his colleagues back in Washington could hardly seem less interested.

The case briefly upended the Capitol back in September, when Mr. Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, was first indicted in a bribery case accusing him of covertly aiding Egypt and throttling criminal inquiries at home. Dozens of senators called on him to resign.

But after Mr. Menendez brusquely rebuffed them , Democrats and Republicans in the clubby Senate largely moved on. Most have had little to say about the case since, leaving Mr. Menendez free to continue his congressional work as he fights to prove his innocence.

Fellow Democrats have offered explanations. They point out that Mr. Menendez was stripped of his committee chairmanship after the charges, and that he has all but acknowledged his political career is over .

Many — including Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader — have defended Mr. Menendez’s right to clear his name. (The senator was indicted once before but never convicted because of a hung jury; this time, he has pleaded not guilty.)

Perhaps more surprisingly in a capital where partisans are typically eager to weaponize corruption accusations, Republican senators have mostly given a pass to Mr. Menendez, a well-liked deal-maker who has spent three decades in Congress, and to his party.

“I’m really glad he’s not a Republican,” Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, said on Wednesday.

The tone could yet ramp up as prosecutors air their case in the coming weeks. But with a war in the Middle East consuming the Senate and former President Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial continuing in New York, there are few signs that senators are eager to talk more about Mr. Menendez — except one.

Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, has tried unsuccessfully to persuade the chamber to expel Mr. Menendez and expressed frustration that the New Jersey senator’s colleagues were willing to let him stay.

“I’ll never understand how people were OK with that,” he said.

Mr. Fetterman said he was particularly alarmed by accusations that Mr. Menendez had worked as a foreign agent for Egypt, accepting gold bars and other lucrative payoffs, at the same time he was serving as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He argued that Mr. Menendez deserved his day in court but that the Senate should hold its members to a stricter standard.

“It just gets more and more indefensible why we can’t come together and chuck him,” he said.

For now, Mr. Menendez’s trial will have at least one very tangible impact in the narrowly divided Senate. With Mr. Menendez stuck in a New York courthouse five days a week for the next two months, he will not be able to cast votes or participate in committee hearings.

Weitzman goes back to Menendez’s humble beginnings to explain the presence of the cash found in his house. As the the son of Cuban immigrants who grew up poor in tenement housing in Union City, N.J., Menendez frequently saw his parents storing cash in the house. As an adult, he would do the same, a habit he had for years, Weitzman said. Some of the bills found in the house were not even in circulation anymore, which Weitzman said contradicts the prosecution’s claims that this was cash Menendez got from the other defendants.

Now we are onto the cash. The F.B.I. found more than $400,000 of it when they raided the couple’s home. Menendez’s lawyer says the cash belonged to the senator and was amassed over three decades in $400-$500 increments because of trauma in his past.

In a setback for the senator on this point, Judge Stein issued a ruling yesterday precluding his lawyers from presenting testimony from a psychiatrist who had evaluated Menendez . Her testimony had been expected to address the cash authorities found stockpiled in Menendez’s home.

Menendez, as a sitting senator, had an obligation to reveal all his assets in a financial disclosure form, as well as his spouse’s. When he learned about the gold bars he contacted Senate officials to tell them, Weitzman says. He did this before he even knew there was a federal investigation into him, Weitzman said. “He’s not trying to hide his assets,” he said.

If you are just joining us, Avi Weitzman, a defense lawyer for Senator Menendez, is offering his opening statement. The lawyer has said his client never took bribes or broke the law. He is laying blame for the gold bars that authorities found in the couple’s home on Nadine Menendez, the senator’s wife.

Weitzman, a personable lawyer who is peppering his statement with jokes and details about himself (“I’m a twin”), makes another quip. He asks the jury if they know about “Where’s Waldo?”, the fictional character in the red-and-white hat who hides in large crowds. The prosecution objects. Weitzman continues: the evidence will show that while Nadine Menendez was trying to resolve her financial problems and meeting with Daibes, Hana and Uribe, Menendez was nowhere to be found. “Where’s Bob?” Weitzmann says. “He was doing his job.”

Avi Weitzman, Menendez’s lawyer, is taking aim at another key piece of evidence raised by the prosecution: the senator’s repeated Google searches for the price of gold. He says this was not related to any bribes, but carried out because his wife’s family had long owned a lot of gold, including kilogram gold bars.

Weitzman has now leaned in hard to what is likely to be a central pillar of Menendez’s defense: He was fooled by a beautiful woman. “The evidence will show that Nadine was hiding her financial challenges from Bob,” he said. “She kept him in the dark about what she was asking others to give her.”

Weitzman is casting Nadine Menendez as a financially troubled, fun-loving woman who had friendships with a lot of connected men who helped her out. She tried to keep that from Menendez, Weitzman said. They had separate lives and did not even share the same cell phone plan. He asked: “Is it really surprising that Bob might not know that those gold bars” were in her closet? “Nadine was hiding her financial challenges.”

This is a pretty remarkable moment in the courtroom right at the start: Menendez’s defense team is piling on his wife. “Let me say this about Nadine: Nadine had financial concerns that she kept from Bob,” said Avi Weitzman, his lawyer. He asserts that the senator was in the dark about what his wife was up to with the businessmen prosecutors say bribed them.

Weitzman said the senator found Nadine “dazzling.” She was beautiful, tall and spoke four languages. “Bob fell for her.”

The jury that is now listening to opening statements took more than two days to seat. The jury of six men and six women — as well as six alternates — was selected and sworn in by Judge Stein a little before 1 p.m., capping days of questioning. The jurors come from New York and Westchester counties, and many of them have advanced degrees. The group includes a retired economist, an entertainment consultant and an occupational therapist.

We are entering what we expect to be the heart of the defense: the relationship between Bob and Nadine Menendez. Avi Weitzman, the senator’s lawyer, is offering jurors the history of their love story. But he appears to be preparing to blame her for some of the ugliest aspects of this case.

Weitzman said there was an “innocent” explanation for the gold bars and cash. He puts up photos of Nadine Menendez’s closet, which was teeming with clothes. The senator, Weitzman said, “did not know” she had gold bars provided by Fred Daibes. “He knew she had family gold,” Weitzman said.

“Resist that urge, ladies and gentlemen,” Weitzman said, to judge Menendez on the gold and cash found in his home.

Weitzman just boiled the defense into a single line: “In short, the evidence will show Bob was doing his job, and he was doing it right.” He says the prosecutor’s case amounts to “speculation and guesswork.”

He also said Menendez was engaging in diplomacy with Egyptian officials. When he asked about pending criminal cases and investigations, he was trying to make sure investigators were treating his constituents fairly. “That’s what dedicated public servants do,” Weitzman said.

Judge Stein has now interrupted Avi Weitzman, Menendez’s lawyer, a couple of times. He appears to be concerned about how the lawyer is presenting biographical information about the senator’s character.

Avi Weitzman, the lawyer delivering Senator Menendez’s opening, was himself a former prosecutor in the Southern District where, from 2005 to 2012, he handled a dozen criminal jury trials. It’s often high drama when a defense lawyer who once prosecuted cases in the Southern District goes up against the office in a big trial.

Weitzman goes into Menendez’s childhood as the son of Cuban immigrants who grew up in tenement housing in Union City, N.J., became the first person in his family to graduate from college and went into politics because he “was committed to doing good.” “This was not the most lucrative path for him,” Weitzman said. But he chose it because it was the “most rewarding.”

Weitzman, the lawyer for Menendez, begins his opening statement by calling the senator an “American patriot.” He is no foreign agent, but a “lifelong public servant,” Weitzman said. He calls him “Bob,” a man who began his political career 50 years ago while he was still in college.

If you are just joining us, Lara Pomerantz has finished the prosecution’s opening statement. She charged Menendez of putting “greed first.” Avi Weitzman, one of the senator’s lawyers, is now beginning his opening statement of defense. He says flatly that Menendez took no bribes and broke no laws.

Pomerantz, as she wraps up, repeats the line she delivered to the jurors at the start of her opening statement: “Menendez put his power up for sale.” She urges the jury to use their “common sense.” If they do, she said, they will find that “Robert Menendez, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes are guilty.”

Other witnesses the government plans to call include a U.S. Department of Agriculture official, the U.S. attorney of New Jersey and the former attorney general of New Jersey.

Pomerantz confirms that Jose Uribe, who has pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, will testify. Uribe, she says, “will give you an inside look.” “He will testify at this trial in the hopes of getting a lower sentence,” she said, adding, “We’re not asking you to like him.”

Lara Pomerantz, the U.S. prosecutor, said the government will prove its case, in part, through texts Nadine Menendez sent Wael Hana, the owner of a halal meat company. Pomerantz notes that the senator was “too smart” to send texts himself and advised his wife to keep certain things out of her messages. Still, Nadine Menendez sent details in her texts that implicate both of them, Pomerantz said. “The text messages will tell you what happened," she said. "As you read those messages you’ll see the scheme unfold.”

Vivian Yee and Karoun Demirjian

For Egypt, Menendez was key to accessing billions in U.S. aid.

After decades as one of the world’s largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid, the Egyptian government was nervous about how long the largess would continue at that level. But when the United States cut a sliver of that aid in 2017 over Egypt’s grim human rights record, stunning Cairo, Egyptian officials found an ally in Senator Robert J. Menendez of New Jersey.

He happened to be the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a position that Egypt evidently felt could help its footing in Washington. And even as he accused the Trump administration of being insufficiently tough with Egypt, prosecutors say he was doing favors for Egyptian officials who had gotten to know him through his then-girlfriend — signing off on arms sales and secretly helping it lobby Washington to release funding.

In return, according to a federal indictment of Mr. Menendez unsealed last September, Mr. Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, checks and bars of gold.

Since the late 1970s, Washington has sent Cairo up to $1.3 billion each year as a legacy of Egypt’s peace agreement with Israel in the Camp David Accords — money that Egypt treasures as a sign of its strategic importance and which has paid for its ever-growing military arsenal.

For Egypt, the United States is an indispensable patron, one that it constantly tries to convince of its value on issues including terrorism, security for Israel and migration to Europe. Sitting in the southeastern Mediterranean on Israel’s western border, it paints itself as an island of stability in a turbulent region that includes Sudan and Libya.

Since President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took power in 2013 by deposing the country’s first democratically elected leader, Egypt has arrested tens of thousands of activists, opposition politicians, researchers, journalists and other perceived political opponents, including some Egyptians whose only apparent offense is re-sharing Facebook posts critical of the government. It has also muzzled the news media and quashed all protest.

During the years when prosecutors say Mr. Menendez was doing favors for Egypt, other members of Congress were clamoring for more restrictions to be put on the military assistance, or for tranches of it to be frozen, until Egypt improved its human rights record.

Mr. Menendez was one of those calling for change. He was one of 17 senators who signed a 2018 letter pressing the Trump administration to raise “the erosion of political and human rights” in Egypt when Mr. el-Sisi visited Washington.

Here are 7 reasons people gave to avoid jury duty.

Before jury selection in Senator Robert Menendez’s bribery case began, the federal judge overseeing the case gave prospective jurors a chance to explain why serving for the trial’s duration — likely two months — would be a hardship.

The would-be jurors disclosed challenges familiar to many families: child care, work obligations, long-planned vacations and scheduled surgeries.

Other explanations were less conventional. Not all resulted in immediate disqualification. Here are a few:

One juror told the judge, Sidney H. Stein, that he had an extreme fear of heights and would have difficulty serving in a courtroom on the 23rd floor of the federal courthouse. The man, who works as a financial adviser on the second floor of an office building in New Jersey, said he was already feeling anxious and unwell. “I’m really sorry, everybody,” he said as he was excused from service and escorted from a room adjacent to the courtroom, where the judge questioned jurors with hardship claims for the better part of two days.

A doctoral candidate studying art history at CUNY said she had a grant to conduct research at the Centre Pompidou’s archives in Paris next month. Judge Stein suggested that she might shift her research to later in the summer. “In August, Paris is empty,” he said, apparently unaware of the onrush of tourists expected this summer for the Olympic Games.

“August,” she replied, “the archives are closed.”

A woman who works as a law professor explained somewhat sheepishly that she had tickets to see a Bruce Springsteen concert in Spain during a five-week, prepaid summer vacation in Europe scheduled to start later this month.

“Springsteen just announced his tour dates for the next year — seriously,” Judge Stein offered.

“Will he live that long, though?” the prospective juror responded about the rock icon, who is 74.

“He’s decided just to keep on going,” the judge concluded, declining to immediately dismiss the woman. “So, you can catch him, probably.”

A graduate student said she was applying to roughly 25 medical schools and explained that the applications, due in the coming weeks, included multiple essays, which she had not completed. “So that is a priority of mine,” she said. Judge Stein asked about her flexibility to work on the applications at night and on weekends. She explained that she volunteered as an unpaid epidemiologist and also worked 30 hours a week as a gymnastics coach.

A graphic artist who works for late-night comedy television shows said he did not believe he could be impartial. “I’ve certainly worked on things critical of the senator,” he told the judge on Monday. The judge was unconvinced.

The man then added that he had safety concerns, given that some of the charges were tied to foreign governments. “There’s a lot of fears when it comes to this stuff,” he said.

“This is not the Trump trial,” Judge Stein replied, adding, “I’ve never heard any issue like that here.”

Still, the man persisted, noting that he had a fear of the Saudi Arabian government — a country not listed among the names and places jurors had been read at the start of the selection process.

“Now I think you’re simply trying to get out of jury duty,” the judge said.

That’s when the man made a final pitch that seemed to reveal a curious set of priorities.

His pregnant wife, he said, was expected to deliver a baby on June 15.

He was among the final batch of jurors excused on Wednesday.

A woman said she had nonrefundable tickets to travel to Rome and Greece in June. She said she was meeting up with a sister who she had only recently met. “A half sister that I just met in December ’20,” the woman explained.

“I’m tempted to ask people for proof,” Judge Stein said before dismissing the juror.

A cyclist described a planned three-month cross-country bike trip that was planned to start May 30.

”I take it that’s something you can cancel, if need be?” the judge asked, eliciting a yes.

“And reschedule?” he pressed.

“Well,” the cyclist answered, “not as easy.”

Katherine Rosman and Tracey Tully

Senator Bob Menendez’s famous children carry a burden.

Alicia and Rob Menendez have surely enjoyed the privileges of being children of a powerful political leader. Alicia is an increasingly high-profile anchor on the cable news network MSNBC. Rob is a Democratic congressman from New Jersey who is in his first term representing a majority Hispanic district.

But they have also confronted a difficult dynamic: the anguish and embarrassment of having their father, Senator Bob Menendez, being accused of public corruption.

The drama has been relentless. In March, new developments underscored the gravity of the case against the Menendezes’ father, who, with his wife, Nadine Menendez, is accused of accepting bribes of gold, cash and a Mercedes-Benz in exchange for an array of political favors.

After a former ally pleaded guilty and began cooperating with prosecutors, Senator Menendez and Nadine Menendez were additionally charged with obstructing justice. Both have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Alicia and Rob Menendez used to be game to talk publicly about their father, joking about his penchant for playing Super Mario Bros., his love of musical theater — “Wicked” is his favorite show, they said in a 2011 campaign ad — and his bragging about being on the varsity bowling team in high school.

These days, they are less eager to talk about him. But their desire for privacy is complicated by the fact that they too are public figures who cannot, without sacrificing their own careers, avoid a public spotlight.

Rob Menendez, 38, is fighting for political survival in a June 4 Democratic primary. He and his father share a name, and Senator Menendez has not ruled out running for re-election in November as an independent candidate — leaving open the possibility that both could appear on the same ballot and confuse voters.

Alicia Menendez, 40, has been forced to address the charges against her father — and calls for his resignation — on live television.

The legal drama has unfolded in parallel with important events in the siblings’ own careers. In March, a judge ordered Senator Menendez and his wife back to court just as Alicia and Rob were preparing for President Biden’s State of the Union address — Alicia would be contributing to MSNBC’s live coverage of the event, and Rob would be in attendance, a member of the congressional assembly.

Friends and colleagues say that it is a challenging time emotionally and professionally for Alicia and Rob Menendez, both of whom declined through spokesmen to comment for this article.

They are unlikely — however unfair it may be — to escape the stigma of the allegations against their father, said Sally Quinn, the longtime writer from The Washington Post who does not know the Menendezes but has observed the familial fallout of political scandal from the Nixons to the Clintons to the Cuomos to the Trumps.

“When your close loved one is at the center of a political scandal,” she said, “it’s in your obit too.”

A senator’s wife drew prosecutors’ attention.

In early 2019, Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey and his new girlfriend, Nadine Arslanian, were thriving.

He had avoided a federal bribery conviction after his trial ended with a hung jury , and the couple had begun traveling the world.

Mr. Menendez proposed to Ms. Arslanian that October in India with a grand gesture, singing “Never Enough” from “The Greatest Showman” outside the Taj Mahal. They married a year later and were showered with gifts from a dozen influential friends.

The senator moved into his wife’s modest split-level house in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., and they have since attended state dinners at the White House, dining with the president of France and the prime minister of India.

Then their life took a dark turn.

Mr. Menendez, a Democrat, is again on trial, charged with taking part in an elaborate, yearslong bribery scheme. This time there is a volatile new element: charges against his wife.

The case, prosecutors have indicated, is as much about Ms. Menendez as it is about her husband. They have depicted the couple as collaborators who took bribes in exchange for the senator’s willingness to steer weapons and government aid to Egypt, prop up a friend’s halal meat monopoly and meddle in criminal investigations involving allies.

Together, prosecutors contend, Mr. Menendez and his wife were entangled in corrupt schemes that began even before their marriage. The bribes, which included cash and gold bars, helped Mr. and Ms. Menendez live above their lawful means, prosecutors say.

Ms. Menendez, 57, has pleaded not guilty, as has her husband. Her trial was delayed until summer after her lawyers notified the court that she was contending with a serious illness.

Ms. Menendez did not respond to requests for comment. But court records and interviews with her former lawyers, acquaintances and longtime friends show that the years after her 2005 divorce from her previous husband were a time of legal tumult and financial uncertainty.

She relied mainly on alimony and child support, and at one point picked up part-time work as a hostess at a New Jersey restaurant, said Douglas Anton, a lawyer who represented Ms. Menendez in several legal matters.

Mr. Anton, who dated Ms. Menendez before her relationship with Mr. Menendez began, said he had been struck by her sharp intelligence and felt frustrated that she had not pursued a career.

“Just a smart woman,” Mr. Anton said. “Her talents were being wasted.”

As Menendez’s star rose, fears of corruption cast a persistent shadow.

Robert Menendez’s education in political corruption came unusually early. In 1982, he turned against his mentor, Mayor William V. Musto of Union City, N.J., the popular leader of their gritty hometown.

Mr. Menendez took the witness stand and testified that city officials had pocketed kickbacks on construction projects, helping to put a man widely seen as his father figure behind bars. Mr. Menendez, then 28, wore a bulletproof vest for a month.

The episode, which Mr. Menendez has used to cast himself as a gutsy Democratic reformer, helped fuel his remarkable rise from a Jersey tenement to the pinnacles of power in Washington as the state’s senior senator. The son of Cuban immigrants, Mr. Menendez broke barriers for Latinos and has used his perch as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to influence presidents and prime ministers.

But those who have closely followed his career say the years he spent enmeshed in Mr. Musto’s machine also set the tone for another, more sinister undercurrent that now threatens to swallow it — one in which Mr. Menendez became a power broker himself whose own close ties to moneyed interests have repeatedly attracted the scrutiny of federal prosecutors.

The explosive bribery charges he now faces accuse the senator and his wife of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for helping increase U.S. assistance to Egypt and trying to throttle a pair of criminal investigations involving New Jersey businessmen. Investigators who searched their suburban home found piles of cash squirreled away, gold bars , and what they described as an ill-gotten Mercedes-Benz.

Interviews with nearly two dozen New Jersey political figures who worked with, watched and fought him, as well as a review of court records stretching back two decades, paint a complicated portrait of a man who has been both a pathbreaking legislator of unusual intelligence and a vindictive politician with a propensity for accepting lavish gifts he could never have afforded on a government salary.

As a measure of how damning the indictment appears, no one — not even a longtime ally recommended by Mr. Menendez’s office — agreed to publicly defend him on the conduct described by prosecutors.

“What we are witnessing is a pattern that developed early and just spun out of control,” said Robert Torricelli, a former Democratic senator from New Jersey who served alongside Mr. Menendez in Washington. “People don’t often change. In a lot of ways, Bob Menendez is still a Union City commissioner in the late 1970s.”

Christopher Maag

The Menendez indictment set off a political frenzy in New Jersey.

Facing federal charges that he accepted bribes, including cash, gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz, Senator Robert Menendez announced on Sept. 22 that he would not resign.

A day later, Andy Kim, a little-known Democratic congressman from southern New Jersey, gathered his top advisers for a conference call. Everyone present assumed that Mr. Kim would announce his intention to challenge Mr. Menendez for his Senate seat.

The question was when.

Zack Carroll, who was Mr. Kim’s campaign manager during his first race for Congress in 2018, told the group that a typical campaign launch takes six weeks. “You don’t upset a two-term incumbent by flying by the seat of your pants,” Mr. Carroll said.

Mr. Kim listened quietly. Then he read aloud his campaign announcement.

“What if I were to announce in three hours?” Mr. Kim said.

The announcement, which Mr. Kim posted on social media that afternoon, kicked off perhaps the luckiest Senate campaign in modern New Jersey history. Over the next six months, Mr. Kim went from underdog to front-runner, outmaneuvering Tammy Murphy, the wife of Gov. Philip D. Murphy, who joined the race in November and quickly won the support of New Jersey’s powerful Democratic Party machine.

In late March, Mr. Menendez said he would not run in the party’s primary. Three days later, Ms. Murphy ended her campaign.

Mr. Kim is not yet a U.S. senator. There are two other candidates in the Democratic primary and four candidates running on the Republican side, although no Republican has won a Senate seat from New Jersey since 1972. Mr. Menendez has also left open the possibility of running for re-election as an independent in November. But Mr. Kim has now become the odds-on favorite.

In many ways he has benefited from the frustration of Democratic voters, particularly progressive activists, over the state’s machine politics.

“Tammy Murphy represents the arrogance of the party bosses,” said Valerie Huttle, a former New Jersey state assemblywoman who was ostracized from the party after she challenged a boss-endorsed candidate for State Senate in 2021. “That’s what I think helped Andy.”

Along the way, he also won a stunning ruling in federal court, barring party chairs from designing ballots in this June’s Democratic primary that give preferential treatment to their endorsed candidates.

“It is probably the most significant shift in New Jersey politics in decades,” said Steven Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City and a candidate for governor in 2025.

Here’s the latest on the Menendez trial.

Opening statements began on Wednesday afternoon in the corruption trial of Senator Robert Menendez , a powerful New Jersey Democrat accused of selling out his public office and his country in pursuit of lucrative bribes.

The case has already dealt a near-lethal blow to Mr. Menendez’s four-decade political career. But a jury of a dozen citizens sworn in earlier Wednesday has now begun formally weighing his fate under intense scrutiny.

Lara Pomerantz , the U.S. prosecutor delivering the government’s opening statement in federal court in Manhattan, said that the case was about a public official “who put his power up for sale.”

Avi Weitzman, the lawyer delivering Mr. Menendez’s opening statement, distilled the senator’s defense into a single line: “Bob was doing his job, and he was doing it right.” He argued that the prosecutor’s case amounted to “speculation and guesswork.”

Mr. Weitzman also attempted to pin blame on the senator’s wife, Nadine Menendez, who has also been charged in the case. “Let me say this about Nadine: Nadine had financial concerns that she kept from Bob,” he said. He asserted that the senator was unaware of what his wife was up to with the businessmen prosecutors say bribed them.

The charges are among the most serious ever brought against a sitting U.S. senator. The government has accused Mr. Menendez and his wife of conspiring to trade his “influence and power” as Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman to foreign powers and New Jersey businessmen in exchange for a Mercedes-Benz convertible , mortgage payments, gold and cash.

Mr. Menendez, 70, has pleaded not guilty to the charges, some of which carry up to 20 years in prison.

He is being tried alongside two of the businessmen, Fred Daibes and Wael Hana. Ms. Menendez, 57, will be tried in July.

The case has already made history. Mr. Menendez is the first senator ever indicted under the foreign agent statute, and the first in the Senate’s 235-year history to be indicted twice in separate bribery cases. His first prosecution ended in a mistrial in 2017.

Here’s what else to know:

The case has proceeded quickly since the government first brought charges in September 2023. But the trial could be protracted. Judge Stein has laid out a timetable that could run until around July 4.

In a setback for the senator, Judge Stein issued a ruling on Tuesday precluding his lawyers from presenting testimony from a psychiatrist who had evaluated Mr. Menendez . Her testimony had been expected to address the cash authorities found stockpiled in Mr. Menendez’s home.

Prosecutors are prepared to detail a list of official actions they say Mr. Menendez traded for bribes. These include ghost writing a letter from Egypt lobbying senators to release military aid; trying to quash criminal cases for Mr. Daibes and another businessman, Jose Uribe; and introducing Mr. Daibes to a member of the Qatari royal family who could invest in a real estate development.