Category: International Corruption

Zelenskyy’s House Cleaning.

Recently. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired several high-ranking officials in what is becoming an ever-widening corruption scandal. Reports emerged on Monday, the 23rd of January, that Zelenskyy had fired his deputy infrastructure minister Vasyl Lozinskyi for allegedly stealing $400,000 that was intended to support the war effort. According to an article in The Guardian, Lozinskyi colluded with contractors to inflate the prices of items such as generators, and he would pocket the difference. According to a Reuters article from the 22nd of January, the defense minister Oleksiy Reznikov had secured food on contracts at highly inflated prices. Zelenskyy’s deputy cabinet minister was also fired after allegations emerged that he drove luxury cars around Kyiv shortly after Russia invaded.

  A Washington Post article published recently highlights the role journalists and NGOs in Ukraine have played in exposing corrupt schemes. Also, according to a recent report by The Guardian, Oleksandr Novikov, the country’s lead anti-corruption tsar, has vowed not to let up on pursuing corrupt individuals despite being in the middle of a war. According to polling done in Ukraine before the war, only 40 percent of the Ukrainian population was willing to report corruption. However, 84 percent of the population is now ready to report wrongdoing. Surely if Countries such as the US and the UK are going to continue giving military aid to Ukraine, they will want to see some progress on the anti-corruption front.

The Imprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi: Politically Motivated or Genuine?

Recently Aung San Suu Kyi was convicted of corruption charges and now faces up to 33 years in prison. She is also facing charges related to breaching COVID-19 laws, sedition, and election fraud. Suu Kyi is viewed as a defender of democratic and human rights in Burma, where the military holds immense power over civil society. According to an article by NPR, the specific corruption charges relate to the alleged misuse of state funds and allowing a cabinet minister to purchase a helicopter. Western experts generally assume that Suu Kyi’s trial is essentially for show, not unlike the trials that took place during the Stalin era in the Soviet Union. Despite Ms. Suu Kyi’s questionable actions regarding the minority Rohingya ethnic group, it seems unlikely that she is guilty of wrongdoing.

Suu Kyi’s trial and corruption charges appear to be a classic example of an authoritarian government attempting to remove a politician with democratic ideals through spurious allegations. Befitting a country where a military junta is in power, there is not much information on how deep corruption runs in Myanmar. However, there is a report authored by the Anti-Corruption Resource Centre detailing the different types of misconduct that affect civil society in Myanmar. For example, cronyism appears to be prevalent within the military, with high-ranking ministers selling state-run assets to close friends and associates with little transparency being observed. Myanmar also suffers from a “resource curse,” meaning that while it is blessed with many natural resources, corruption surrounding oil & gas exploration and logging is rampant. It seems very clear that the military junta sees Suu Kyi as a threat to their abuses and of their grip on power, so putting her in prison on politically motivated charges appears, from their perspective, to be the only option.