Unmasked
Corruption in the West
by Laurence Cockcroft and Anne-Christine Wegener
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Pub Date 28 Feb 2017 | Archive Date 28 Feb 2017
Description
Corruption in the US and Europe is beginning to dominate headlines. In the recent US election, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was damaged by a perceived lack of transparency, with questions looming over the Clinton Foundation and the controversy surrounding the private email server. And despite President-elect Trump’s new promise to ‘Drain the Swamp’, he has previously called the key Foreign Corrupt Practices a ‘horrible law’. 2016 saw both the Panama Papers - arguably the most significant revelation ever of the scale of corruption among the global elite - and the FIFA corruption scandal.
Here, two world experts on anti-corruption reveal the massive and hitherto unknown scale of the problem. Their timely book raises many urgent questions for the changing political world in which we now live: namely, why has anti-corruption legislation has not been more effective? Are Europe and the US genuinelyserious about fighting corruption and if so, can they work together to do so?
Laurence Cockcroft is a Development Economist and Founder of Transparency International, the global civil society organization against corruption. He is the author of Global Corruption: Money, Power and Ethics in the Modern World.
Anne-Christine Wegener is an anti-corruption consultant. She was previously Deputy Director and Programme Manager at Transparency International UK, focusing on Defence and Security.
Advance Praise
‘A tour de force’- Simon Taylor, Co-founder of Global Witness
‘An important book on an uncomfortable subject’- Paul Collier, author of Exodus: Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century
'Anyone who has a working or other interest in banking and big business in general, organised crime, and sport, besides fraud prevention in particular, can profit from reading one or more chapters. These topics and more are covered in reports on the Transparency International website; but the authors have done a service by bringing together their argument inside book covers...the layout and writing style of the book feel fresh and altogether free of the stodginess that could so easily have attended such a worthy subject. And the quite low price, compared with some books, is welcome too, to encourage non-specialists into buying.'- Mark Rowe, Professional Security Magazine
‘an important work that provides a bedrock of understanding…highly readable…Unmasked comes as at important time, just as the world is turning in on itself. The West should learn the lessons that are described so well in the book and use this difficult period to ensure that the first gear in which it has for so long been engaged is kicked into second and upwards not into reverse.’
- Jeff Kaye, Transparency International
Marketing Plan
Laurence Cockcroft will be interviewed BBC Radio 4's Start the Week on 9th January, shedding light on corruption outside of the developing world.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781784536084 |
| PRICE | US$19.50 (USD) |
Featured Reviews
David W, Media/Journalist
Staggering look in the Western mirror
The first (reported) case of fixing an Olympic event dates to 388 BC. Today, syndicates pay £68,000 per lower level football match to players and officials to throw a single game. It’s worth it, because sports betting is a £1.1 billion per day industry. There is so much about western society that is corrupt, we don’t even notice. We’re used to seeing the Transparency International ratings of country corruption, where western nations rank high. Now, two veterans of TI shine their light on the west, and it’s not very pretty.
Unmasked’s chapter headings are very telling: government, lobbying, business, banking, justice, organized crime, sports, and environment. Massive corruption rules them all. The authors show that political parties simply ignore the campaign finance rules and laws they promulgated, gorging on donations and bribes at will. They accept money from foreign powers, accept cash for services never rendered, and put party or even dead people on government payrolls.
There’s an endless litany of stats that say Washington is corrupt:
-$5.2 billion in lobbying garnered $4.2 trillion in returns in concessions and customized tax breaks from 2007-2012.
-Lobbyists spend an average of $12.5 million per member of Congress, because it works.
-More than 50% of former elected officials become lobbyists.
What we live with, others see as corruption. No bankers were ever imprisoned for the financial crisis. But American jails are filled to bursting with two million souls charged with far more minor crimes. The bankers get cabinet posts. Picking the next Olympic or World Cup site is a feast for bribes, suitcases of cash. Politicians have tax haven secret bank accounts for direct deposit. Police everywhere find it acceptable to shake down crooks and dealers rather than arrest them. Construction contracts are routinely padded 10%, to accommodate the payoffs. Judges don’t bother to recuse themselves from cases where one of the parties has donated massively to their re-election. A jury found Koch Industries made false claims to the government - 25,000 times.
It all costs. Organized crime accounts for 10% of the OECD economies. Untold billions flow to the few at the expense of the many. Whether it’s avoiding environmental cleanups, plying doctors to prescribe outrageously expensive drugs or lobbying for direct exemptions when no one else gets them, corruption diverts funds, up to and including wind farms in Italy. We can’t even imagine how much farther along we would be without it all. With Unmasked, we are just scratching the surface. It is not a feel good book. But it is a brisk-paced, riveting one.
David Wineberg
