Transparency International’s Cobus de Swardt and Amber Poroznuk went to the OECD headquarters in Paris to interview the great mind at the head of the OECD- Mr. Angel Gurría, on the opportunities in the global economy for international institutions, development and aid issues, the OECD Convention and on the future of the OECD.

Cobus de Swardt (CdS):
Let me start by asking what you currently see as the greatest opportunities in the global economy for international institutions.

Angel Gurría (AG):
The mandate of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is to make the world economy work better. As simple as that, and as complicated as that. Our last ministerial meeting gave us the mandate to become the hub of globalisation. Now globalisation presents us with many challenges - transactions, investments, the economy, the environment, agriculture, water, migration, everything is now more and more cross-border; but also a possibility to deal with global issues. To observe them, measure them, compare them, analyse them, extract some conclusions and then propose best practices, both to our members and non-members.

This allows us to be completely devoid of an agenda, in terms of ideology or politics. But armed with the collective experience of our 30 democracies we can ask: ‘What works, what doesn’t work? What has worked, what turned out to be wrong?’

CdS:
You refer to a number of global issues - they refer to ideas that remain very contested. In the area of development and aid, for example, the World Bank/ International Monetary Fund (IMF) September meetings in Singapore again put the focus on the issue of conditionality. You had World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz and the UK’s Secretary of State for Development Hilary Benn taking seemingly opposite sides and opposite views on conditionality and aid.

What are your own views on the issues of conditionality and aid; particularly with regard to the kinds of issues we are interested in - transparency and corruption?

AG:
The issue in Singapore was precisely about corruption. It was not a theoretical issue of whether there should be conditionality or not. The question is to get it right, to create the right incentives. Except now we are introducing an element of emphasis. I think the point was not that Mr. Benn and Mr. Wolfowitz were at odds with each other. It was about having a discussion to find out what the best way is. Except that it is a little uncomfortable if you want to have it with a hundred people at the same table and a thousand media outlets trying to find a story, as if the story of fighting corruption were not enough.

It is not that the World Bank discovered corruption yesterday. It is just that there is an emphasis now, an added importance. And that is the news. It is morally and ethically correct but maybe it is not newsworthy enough; we should however avoid, distorting the main thrust of the policy.

CdS:
The OECD Convention is, in our view, still widely regarded as critical to the international fight against corruption. Its successful enforcement will arguable significantly reduce international supply side corruption. However, despite a decade of efforts, there has not been even minimum active enforcement of the Convention in two-thirds of signatory countries. And, in TI’s view, this is not only eroding support for the Convention, but clearly governments that now prosecute foreign bribery, even if insufficiently so, are likely to become less enthusiastic if their competitors continue to bribe. There is a lot of good work that has gone into the OECD Convention, but if the Convention doesn’t increase its impact and if there is not much more enforcement across signatory countries it will actually lose support. Do you agree that the success of the convention is not yet assured?

AG:
This was true when there was one country that was effectively enforcing, because there were 35 that were not. Now there are 12 countries doing it.

CdS:
But there are still 24 who are not.

AG:
Yes, there are 24 who are not doing it yet or not enough. But then the other 12 could have lost their nerve on day one and they didn’t. And they are big countries that are enforcing. We should not stop. We should just continue. This is the only way. Now, should we become more strident? I think what we should do is appeal precisely to those who are most affected, which are, number one, the business community in the countries that are enforcing the convention; and number two, the countries that would be the subject of the bribery efforts- the developing countries mostly – and have them sign the OECD Convention or the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC).

But progress has been made in the ethical, moral and the political sphere. There are advances also in the usage. I think we are making progress because more and more people are now aware and behaving accordingly, and the competitive environment is also helping. If somebody perceives that the guy that got the contract did it by doing the wrong thing, there also are, increasingly, institutions where you have recourse. Strengthening institutions; capacity building; clearly defining the rules of the game. These are the challenges. Having not only good rules, but having enforcement of the rules at the level of the recipient countries. Creating transparency in the process.

CdS:
I would agree that progress has been made. The monitoring done by the OECD Working Group has played a major part. Some doubts exist at the moment of whether monitoring will continue once its second phase comes to an end in 2007. TI would strongly urge that this monitoring continues, but also urge the Working Group to make public the results by listing all prosecutions and the number of investigations in an annual report on monitoring.

AG:
Maybe it should. But, it is far easier to publish what is being done than to get things done that today are not being done. We may have to revise our own plans, because the idea was that after 10 years you would be looking at the second stage, where there would be a very great element of self-enforcement. It is obvious that is not yet the situation. Either we were not good enough at selling this, or the objective conditions were not fully appraised, and we should have imagined it would take longer. What cannot happen is that there is a perception we are relaxing the effort. We just have to make everybody feel that we are breathing down their necks and we are going to catch up with them sooner or later.

CdS:
As well as the continuous monitoring that we would strongly urge the OECD to do, there also is the question of enforcement, raised at the last four Group of Eight (G8) meetings. Could you envisage the OECD reporting back to the G8 in Germany on progress by G8 countries on enforcement?

AG:
Why not? That is done already. People know. Enforcement is something we can recommend and remind countries that they signed a convention with the force of law. Because it is an international treaty. It is not a wishful thinking. It is not a memorandum of understanding. It’s a law.

CdS:
The level of awareness of the OECD Convention is still lacking in many countries. The latest Control Risks/ Simmons & Simmons report on International Business Attitudes to Corruption Survey showed that half of people are not aware of the Convention, in particularly of the legal obligations, and another 18 percent are only vaguely aware. We feel that the country visits, from your own Working Group, are playing a very important role in improving awareness, and yet we are concerned that this might be downscaled instead of actually increased from the OECD side.

AG:
You’re talking about budgetary issues here. It’s not that there is any intention to downscale visits. It’s simply that we have a number of competing demands. And you are asking if we have enough money to do as much monitoring and promotion as we want. Well, the answer is in every single case that we don’t. Whether it is climate change or water or migration, or taxes– and the answer is no. We don’t have enough money; and that includes the monitoring of anti-bribery. We have to stretch a modest budget to cover an increasingly ambitious substantive agenda.

However, to increase awareness about the Convention, countries can do a lot, and actually some of them have made great efforts to promote a better knowledge and utilization of this instrument. So we can also rely on committed countries to promote it.

CdS:
There is an impression from civil society around the world that although they are paid lip service to be important actors, neither the World Bank, the regional development banks or other international institutions actively seek to involve them. Do you think there is something you personally can do from the OECD to empower greater participation of civil society?

AG:
How does civil society participate in the dealings between the provider of turbines and the electrical authority, or the water authority, of the high officials of a particular developing country? There are rules. When projects are financed by the World Bank or a regional development bank there are rules. And many countries have their own, quite clear rules for public procurement. One way civil society should be involved, is to make sure that the rules are very good. Another way is to ensure that the governments enforce those rules. Not only in a particular transaction but also making sure that the process is always respected.

It is about institution building. The demand for these institutions must come from within. When we are talking about transparency it is essentially about the people’s right to know. In the countries that have an Anglo-Saxon culture, for example, this sense that people have the right to know is quite well developed. I am not saying that the situation we have is ideal, rather, that we are in a process. But I am not willing to discuss the possibility of backtracking; I am saying we can’t backtrack.

CdS:
At the September World Bank/ IMF meetings you talked about the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee playing a coordinating role with donors. Do you see, from your own experience with the OECD Convention, an active role for the OECD in monitoring the UNCAC?

AG:
I would like to see a mutually reinforcing process, where the members who are already signed onto the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, should be full members of the UN Convention. If we have these major countries, they have the impact that the rest of the world looks at them. More important than whether they are members or not, is whether they practice the best practices. Of course we can say to countries, ‘you should sign the UN Convention’, and the UN can say, ‘you should sign the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention.’ But mostly we ask, ‘are you practicing?’

CdS:
And in some cases, we have countries such as Russia that have not signed up and, by not doing so, have set a very bad example.

AG:
Many countries have expressed interest or agreement to adopt a number of OECD principles in a process leading to eventual membership. If that was the case, and if the proper process was observed, just the discussion for membership would yield a desirable result.

CdS:
That’s interesting, because one of the incoming priorities you had was the expansion of OECD membership. Regarding the criteria for membership, how high on your radar screen would be both signing and enforcing the OECD Convention?

AG:
I do not see that a country would be granted full accession to the OECD if it had not signed on to the Anti-Bribery Convention first. But frankly, I do not feel that countries find this difficult. I don’t know of a single country that openly condones these practices. Some may be more lax, but I have not found anyone who thinks this is a normal state of affairs. This maybe used to be the case, but these situations evolve. The word transparency before used to be when a window did not have a lot of stains. Now it is synonymous with anti-corruption.

CdS:
A lot of the feedback we get from OECD countries is that quite often the judiciary in those countries struggle because of the sophistication involved with prosecuting these cases. Would it not be one of the areas that the OECD could think of strengthening by getting prosecutors that work on this in closer contact with each other?

AG:
Yes, the judiciary is one crucial element of success. If you would have meetings of prosecutors, specialised prosecutors, they could show each other the ropes. Yes, of course, the answer is yes.

CdS:
Well, that is very important because of the international nature of many of these cases. And you want to be able to show that those on the supply side of corruption will be prosecuted. When you have people in the South saying ‘there is corruption that took place here’ but people are protected because they sit in the North, you start to have a very difficult moral case to make.

AG:
Let’s get a little real here. Number one, if you catch the bad guys in the South that is good enough. It is good enough because by catching them, you demonstrate to other people that they will be caught as well. Therefore if somebody offers a bribe, they are going to say “no, no please, don’t even think about it”.

And second, there is an element of naming and shaming. If, a country in the South is saying ‘I am trying to fight corruption in this country, which is full of so many millions of poor people, and I am trying to make every peso, every dollar, every Euro count. And you, who are housing the companies who come here and offer the bribes, etc, are not helping it.’ That is going to embarrass, not the company, but the government of the company. And you, TI, and we the OECD, and maybe Mr. Wolfowitz with his new line of toughness on this issue, can help magnify the echoes of these calls.

CdS:
We agree with you. That is why we urge, in the recommendations that we submitted to you a few days ago, for the names of those who are prosecuted, as well as for the number of investigations, to be made public.

AG:
Yes, yes, yes.

CdS:
The OECD will do a great service if they do that. We appreciate your time and I know we need to wrap up. Let me ask you a final question: What is your future vision, in terms of your current position and the OECD? By the time that you leave the organisation, what would you like to see being achieved in the fight against corruption?

AG:
These instruments have to become a way of life. The institutional building process should be the rule and the strength of the institutions should be the norm rather than the exception. Also, both developed and developing countries should move towards identifying and stopping, and of course sanctioning, punishing, as you suggested, the more sophisticated types of corruption, where people will get wiser, better at covering their interests.

But I mostly aspire to inject this in the psyche, in the conduct, of people; to make it second nature. It changes with people. There was a generation where this was common practice, and it was condoned or maybe even encouraged, it wasn’t even an ethical question or a moral question. It was a way to do things; it was a way to get the contract. In other words, you got fired if you didn’t do it. Now, it is becoming obvious that this is maybe not an appropriate conduct. That is an improvement. Maybe the next step is to say this is undesirable, unbecoming conduct, and then more and more people around you will reject it.

You have work on both sides, building political accountability on both sides, building institutions on both sides. And you have to deal in an exemplary fashion with the individual cases. And then I think you have a good shot at seeing this reduced.

CdS:
Well, we wish you the best of luck, and can assure you that Transparency International will remain a critical but constructive partner of the OECD.