Peter Eigen on Fighting Corruption

Welcome to the first episode of Patterns and Stories. Joining us today is Peter Eigen, the founder of Transparency International, a non-governmental organization fighting corruption with national chapters in over 100 countries. Peter founded Transparency in 1993, and before that, he worked at the World Bank. We will discuss the challenges of fighting corruption and what citizens can do about it.

We are your hosts, Luca Dellanna and Ismail Manik.

The transcript was lightly edited for grammar and fluency.

Highlights

“I wanted to set up a system where all the suppliers stop bribing simultaneously, and nobody would lose from that. I pushed this as a proposal within the World Bank, [...] and it didn't work at all because the countries which are the owners of the World Bank, like Germany, France, the UK, Japan, and so on, said you cannot get any business in the international market if you don't bribe.”

“Even the vice president for Africa said, yeah, we are going to do that. But he ran very quickly into the opposition of the owners of the World Bank, of the shareholders, who wanted their companies to continue to be allowed to bribe internationally. [...] I was not convinced anymore that it was really the corrupt African leaders who were demanding the bribes, but it was at least as much the corrupt suppliers who were offering the bribes from the North.”

“If you leave it to the government to control corruption, it will be very hard to be successful. [...] The better solution is if one gets together a civil society and organizes something like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, or Save The Children. This is where citizens get together to promote something that, to some extent, is supposed to help society as large but which the government is very often not able to supply. [...] It's important to get these citizen groups together and join them in a discourse with the government and the private sector in a given situation. And on that basis, you can change things.”

“[In Germany], until 1999, [companies bribing foreign governments] would get a tax write-off. They could declare this a useful expense.”

“We don't see ourselves as a transparency initiative, as an organization that chases individual corruption cases. We are doing that also if it is necessary for our mandate to change the system. But the main thing is we want to change the system.”

“There was one firm, the firm Bosch, know, the big electric firm, which lent us, for instance, their boardrooms for our sessions in Stuttgart, which supported our way. But they didn't want to mention this because they felt ashamed. They were embarrassed that they didn't bribe, you know, because the others, their competitors, thought they had to bribe because otherwise they wouldn't get contracts. So, it was very strange to build up a system of support.”

“We don't want to change the whole world from one day to the other, but we want to create certain situations, say, the road sector of Uganda or the health sector in Ghana or so. And we would say in that sector we try honesty, [and] we allow everything else to continue. We are not going to name and shame corrupt people. If you find out about it to the contrary, we try to become friends with the companies, in particular the multinational corporations. [...] Eventually, we convinced them through this integrity pact, which we eventually developed into a legal system where we would ask people who bid for a certain contract to enter into a triangular contract with civil society and with the government in whi