Ethics Newsline®

VARIOUS DATELINES
Corruption issues from around the globe dominated the headlines last week. Among the top developments:

• Chile’s Supreme Court last week approved the extradition of Alberto Fujimori, the former president of Peru, on charges of corruption and human rights abuses. Fujimori has been living in Chile in exile since 2005. Legal experts told the New York Times that the ruling may set an important precedent for similar cases in which heads of state have sought refuge in other countries and avoided or delayed extradition.
• Taiwan vice president Annette Lu and two other members of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party were indicted on corruption and forgery charges last week. Lu is accused of claiming reimbursement for millions in expenses using more than a thousand phony receipts, reports the Jurist, a publication of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Her codefendants face similar charges.
• The White House briefly addressed the lingering issue of corruption in Iraq, but only to say that prime minister Nuri al-Maliki was “working hard” to fight corruption. The Agence France-Presse notes that White House spokesman Tony Fratto declined to speculate on whether those efforts had been successful. The issue of alleged corruption also surfaced in the recent controversy involving the private security contractor Blackwater USA, embroiled in controversy after the deaths of at least 11 people in Baghdad last week: The Reuters news agency reports that Blackwater officials have denied press reports that the firm has been importing illegal and unlicensed weapons into Iraq.
• Thousand of Filipinos joined mass demonstrations last week to protest alleged corruption and political violence. According to the International Herald Tribune, protestors claim little has changed since the rapaciously corrupt Marcos era, and they denounced current president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for alleged involvement in politically motivated killings and abductions.
• The public mood has soured considerably in Thailand in the year since the bloodless coup overthrowing the allegedly corrupt prime minister, reports BBC correspondent Jonathan Head. When former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra was ousted in a bloodless coup, the incoming military government promised quick reconciliation, but Head reports that today’s “newspapers are full of commentators wringing their hands over the military-backed government’s many failures. One paper described the past 12 months as a ‘lost year’; another said that all the hopes raised by the military’s intervention were now futile — that Thailand’s democracy had been sent back into a ‘Jurassic Age.’ “
• Chinese officials, in the midst of a massive anticorruption drive, last week announced that in the past five years, more than 146,000 Chinese officials have voluntarily surrendered bribes they have accepted. Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, reports that the government is urging officials who have traded power for bribes to confess their crimes, turn in the money, and receive lenient treatment. About $18 million worth of bribe money has been turned in, according to the Xinhua report.