Silencing a Whistleblower: A Story of Hypocrisy

By Cobus de Swardt

This book examines how insufficient policies can lead to the alleged abuse of power in organisations. When independent ethical structures and processes are missing or weak, practices of abuse, misconduct and cover-ups can easily arise at the leadership level. Even organisations that specialise in good governance are no exception, as illustrated by this case study on arguably the world’s most influential anti-corruption NGO, Transparency International (TI).

Written by the former Managing Director of Transparency International, this book chronicles its ethical breakdown over a 5-year period starting in 2015. By comparing TI’s whistleblower policies with its internal whistleblower practices, it demonstrates how the organisation gradually became trapped in a vicious cycle of secrecy, corruption and lies.

The author chronologically tracks TI’s practices, drawing on 12 whistleblower complaints filed with TI since 2017, as well as communications with TI, international donor agencies, and other international civil society organisations from 2015 to 2020 to do so. The chronological format aptly reveals the snowball effect that ethical weaknesses can create over time, as well as the emotional warfare that whistleblowers are typically subjected to. The unfolding chronology also shows what it means to be a whistleblower for an organisation that avoids public transparency, reporting on and scrutiny of its own practices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Sep 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030765408

Book preview

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

C. de SwardtSilencing a Whistleblowerhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76540-8_1

1. Saturday 1 May 2004: Berlin

Cobus de Swardt¹  

(1)

Berlin, Germany

Cobus de Swardt

Email: [e-mail]

Elke, Kai and I woke up on the wooden floor of our new flat to our first day in Berlin. Elke was four months pregnant with Ami. We had two borrowed mattresses, our luggage, Elke’s guitar and our dreams. On Monday I was going to start my new job at Transparency International.

We got up and went out for a coffee. We walked to have a look at Kai’s new French school. The weather and the streets of Berlin’s suburbs looked very different from what I had expected. It was quite warm and the sky was clear and blue. Many of the buildings were interesting, even colourful. There were trees everywhere. The images I knew from German movies were of grey skies, dark buildings, underground trains and serious people contemplating the meaning of life. Whilst the guy at the corner shop was not friendly in a South African way, he was easy-going, gave us small change and explained how to use the tickey box.¹

We phoned my mom in Cape Town. She was more worried than usual. ‘Are you ok? We see all the images of Berlin up in flames with riots.’² I explained that it was the traditional 1 May Berlin riots, but that we were far away from them out in the suburbs. ‘Did the Germans allow you into the country?’ she asked. ‘Yes, no problems’ I answered. ‘Only the sense of humour is a bit different. When the customs guy looked at my passport he asked me how come I am not black. I told him that I only look white—but he did not find that interesting or funny. Elke explained that the Germans have a different sense of humour.’ My mom then told me that the ‘Argus’ newspaper had a big story about me going to TI: South African chosen to clean-up the world. My father, lighthearted and caring as always, chipped in ‘I told my bridge mates that you are now chasing the mafia! You must be careful of the crooks. Don’t go to a gun fight with a knife.’ We told them not to worry, that we were safe and very happy to finally have arrived in Berlin.

For us, being in Berlin was very exiting. On the floor of our empty flat Elke wrote a song—a tango:

Standing in front of parts of the old Berlin Wall on Sunday afternoon, I remembered the sense of awe I felt watching the fall of the Wall on our small black and white TV screen in Cape Town in 1989. I was once again inspired by the actions of civil society and the people who stood up against injustice. Right here where we were standing, they brought the Cold War to an end after decades of world leaders failing to do so. These events also re-shaped my life in Cape Town. In the wake of the Cold War, a huge geo-political vacuum was created in southern Africa. The turbulence of the combined internal grassroots actions and the external geo-political forces created a watershed moment for South Africa. Within 60 days of the fall of the Wall, Nelson Mandala was released from prison, the ANC was unbanned and the end of Apartheid in sight. That I could now work in this city for civil society and social justice was humbling: a dream come true.

By Sunday evening two intense days exploring a new city had come to an end. Making Berlin our home—the place where Africa was carved up as a game, where the Holocaust was planned with pride—was also discomforting. What had happened here was not my personal history. All the same, it very much confronted me. It was a stark reminder that as long as one thinks about us and them, the abuses and cruelties of the past are likely to repeat themselves. These two days had brought a lot of reflection. They were also invigorating.

On Monday morning I got on the S1 suburban train to Otto Suhr Allee to start my new job at Transparency International.

Footnotes

1

South African word for a public phone.

2

If quotations are from written works or verbatim as I wrote them down during the conversation, I use double quotation marks. If I wrote down the quotation after the conversation, I use single quotation marks. Single quotation marks are also used for a quotation within a quotation. I only cite what people told me if: (i) I believed the source to be reliable, and (ii) the person had been in the position to obtain the information first hand (i.e. a Board member present at a Board meeting), and (iii) if the information correlated very strongly with information from other independent sources.

3

Free translation from the German original.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

C. de SwardtSilencing a Whistleblowerhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76540-8_2

2. 1993–2020: TI: A Short History of Holding the Powerful to Account

Cobus de Swardt¹  

(1)

Berlin, Germany

Cobus de Swardt

Email: [e-mail]

This is a very short history of TI focussed on the issues of holding the powerful to account. As such, it is not comprehensive in scope or depth, but relevant to the focus of this book.

TI is the world’s ethical conscience.¹

Transparency International (TI) was established in 1993. Its founders set out to do something against corruption. They wanted to stand up against how corruption fuelled injustice. Many of the people involved with TI in its early years had experience with the ‘development and aid industry’ of the 1970s and 1980s. Peter Eigen and Frank Vogl came from the World Bank; Olusegun Obasanjo, at that time an opposition leader in Nigeria having previously been President (and later again); Hansjörg Elshorst headed the German Development Cooperation Agency; Kamal Hossain was a former Bangladesh Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Justice; Joe Githongo was a Kenyan businessman; and Jeremy Pope left his post as General Counsel of the Commonwealth Secretariat to become TI’s first Managing Director. Together with several other people they saw how the ‘development and aid industry’ fuelled corruption, benefited those in positions in power—political and administrative—and trapped poor people in poverty. They wanted to change this. To fight corruption those in power had to be held accountable. From early on TI sought to:

Hold the powerful to account for the common good. Through our advocacy, campaigning and research, we work to expose the systems and networks that enable corruption to thrive, demanding greater transparency and integrity in all areas of public life.²

In the early 1990s a pessimistic view of corruption prevailed. It was widely seen as inevitable and impossible to control. It could only be expressed in abstract ways. Moreover, when TI was founded it did not really know how to tackle corruption. It had no concrete solutions. TI’s founders shared liberal values, a strong sense of decency and an outrage at the injustice caused by corruption. Not much else. They simply said no to corruption—the abuse of power that has greased the wheels of injustice since time immemorial. It was an audacious act of hope that something would happen to make their resistance real.

In 1995 something did pop out of the woodwork. It was the Corruption Perception Index (CPI). Until then it was widely accepted that it was not possible to have any tangible measurement of corruption. The CPI transformed this overnight. It was a game-changer for the fight against corruption. The CPI threw TI a lifeline: TI was now front page news in many countries. TI could now tell a new story about corruption: a story with numbers, that could name and shame, that could hit a nerve. It was developed by Johann Lamsdorff, an academic who proposed the CPI to TI.³ With a simple and ingenious combination of a ‘survey of surveys’ methodology he did three seemingly impossible things. He provided a single number for perceived corruption in the public sector of a country—a feat never done before. He then developed a way to compare the number of different countries relative to each other, and rank them—an accomplishment never imaged before. And he did it in such a way that it could be repeated year after year with an accuracy that remains quite impressive. Without Frank Vogl’s nose for the big story, Peter Eigen’s charm to tell the story, Jeremy Pope’s understanding of the story, and Johann Lamsdorff providing the story, TI  would likely have succumbed to the normal start-up death. To this day the CPI remains TI’s global calling card.

The CPI also has some inherent flaws and weaknesses. It only measures how much corruption is perceived to exist in the public sector of a specific country. This form of corruption tends to be more prevalent in so-called less developed countries.⁴ The CPI does not capture private sector corruption, money laundering or illicit financial flows.⁵ These forms of corruption tend to be more prevalent in so-called more developed countries. In this way the CPI tends to reinforce—incorrectly in my view—stereo types of corruption as being a greater problem in the so-called South.⁶

From early on TI indeed tackled other forms of corruption beyond the public sector, such as international bribery and campaigned for it to be outlawed. At the time bribery was viewed to be beyond the reach of law enforcement, considered to be in the national self-interest of powerful countries. In short: it was seen as inevitable. Companies wrote off bribes as business expenses and national revenue agencies deemed them to be tax deductible. TI significantly contributed to foreign bribery becoming a crime through the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention in 1999. The Convention established legally binding standards to criminalise bribery of foreign public officials in international business transactions. This was the first international anti-corruption instrument focussing on the ‘supply side’ of bribery. Mark Pieth’s speech on calling for additional due diligence on UK companies following the UK’s violation of the Convention inspires me to this day. The powerful could be held to account after all.

In the 1990s TI also campaigned for a universal anti-corruption legal framework. After a decade of struggle and the dogged diplomacy of Dimitri Vlassis from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the United Nations General Assembly in 2003 adopted the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC). This convention is the only legally binding universal anti-corruption instrument.⁷ Through UNCAC it was now possible to tackle corruption more systematically and to coordinate the fight against it globally.

Whilst it could be argued that the levels of corruption had not declined by 2003, binding legal tools to fight corruption internationally were now in place ten years after TI was established. TI also manifested itself as a major and highly regarded anti-corruption player on the international stage. These were significant successes for the young TI.

At national level, the first decade of TI was no less eventful. One of TI’s most important early decisions was to use a franchising model to establish independent locally registered national chapters. This enabled the TI network to rapidly grow. It had an International Secretariat (TI-S) in Berlin and chapters in more than 100 countries. The national fight against corruption was led and controlled by local chapters in their respective countries. Within a decade TI managed to become a global movement.

The diversity of the TI movement was held together by a common quest to fight corruption and a commitment to its core values: transparency, accountability, integrity, solidarity, courage, justice, democracy. It also built consensus around some guiding principles, including: seeking to built coalitions with others; being honest, open and accountable in relationships; providing accurate and timely reports about its activities; and respecting fundamental human rights and freedoms. TI’s organisational and operational models enabled it to influence local and global attitudes and policies, disproportionate to its small size. External observers, such as policy makers and journalists, often remarked that the influence of the TI movement exceeds the sum of its parts.

I first met Peter Eigen in Durban in February 2004. I was inspired by his relentless drive to fight corruption. He had had an immense impact on building TI into a global force within a decade. At the same time, by 2007 it was clear that TI was entering into a new phase and that there was a need for a new generation of leaders and ideas. Against this backdrop I applied to become its Managing Director in April 2007. Particularly, I felt that TI at the time—in part due to the CPI—was somehow trapped in the North–South corruption myth claiming that corruption was mostly a problem in the so-called South. Everything I had learned about corruption clearly showed that this was not the case. In my experience, the abuse of power for private gain was a universal problem. Moreover, whenever the chances to abuse power increase—whether through the absence of checks-and-balances and/or through the misuse of advanced technologies—the levels of corruption inevitable increase as well. Simply put: if the more powerful cannot be held to account by the less powerful, they will most likely abuse their power to unjustly benefit from it. The ability to avoid accountability for the abuse of power indeed underlies most acts of corruption, be it at local, national or international levels.

In my view, since the onset of colonialism, the major culprits and beneficiaries of international corruption have been nation states and companies from the so-called North. Moreover, these actors tended to avoid accountability for their actions that included the wealth stripping of poorer countries and poor people across the world. Based on these premises, I argued that TI needed to focus more directly on the main facilitators of international corruption—the multinationals, the banks, the financial centres of the most powerful countries.

In addition, I held, and hold, the view that corruption is seen by many, including TI, as a technical issue to be solved through special laws and policies. In my view, corruption is very much a social justice and human rights issue—holding the powerful to account for the common good. Accordingly, I argued that TI would need to build new kinds of coalitions beyond the technocrats and policy makers. I believed that working more at the grassroots level and engaging directly with people and their experiences of corruption was critical to building more sustainable accountability systems. This would take the fight against corruption to the next level. Here I was inspired by the ground breaking work of my colleagues Miklos Marschall and Ben Elers who started to develop TI Advocacy and Legal Advice centres (ALACs) with TI chapters in Eastern Europe.

Against the backdrop of my views of corruption, as well as my aspirations to build a more grassroots TI, the Board decided to appoint me as the Managing Director in 2007. The next 10 years were full of all kinds of excitement. One of our best decisions was hiring Chrik Poortman. He had left the World Bank as Vice-President when he stood up against the wrongdoing of Paul Wolfowitz and came to work at TI as Director of our Global Work. Chrik brought vision, calmness and integrity. Similarly, Frank Vogl serving as an Advisor on a pro bono basis was most beneficial to me over the years. He helped me to step back and look at the big picture: inside the room his critique was explosive, outside his loyalty to the greater cause was a calming force. Miklos Marschall later became the Deputy Managing Director. His judgement on issues and people was always driven by his quest for the social good—it was inspiring and easy to work with him, a privilege indeed. The selfless advice and support, as well as the political savvy of particularly Nadja Kostka, Stan Cutzach and Virginie Coulloudon, were invaluable to TI and to me over many years.

Over time I learned that one should only appoint people who you respect—as professionals and as human beings—to the extent that you would be willing to work for them as your boss. I was indeed very privileged to work with many highly dedicated and principled TI people in Berlin and around the world. Almost all disagreements we had were on anti-corruption tactics, management strategies and resource allocations. Our shared values and aspirations for TI to ‘walk the talk’ were a common bond which made working together easy and inspirational. I will forever treasure this.

My first interview as Managing Director with a journalist from ‘The Financial Times’ was nearly my last. I talked about TI now entering a second wave of anti-corruption campaigning that focussed on the responsibilities of Western governments and companies for perpetuating corruption in poorer parts of the world. I named major financial centres like New York and Singapore, as well as the big banks as key players in global corruption.

‘The Financial Times’ wrote:

In another sign of a more robust stance towards business, TI will in January 2008 for the first time publish a report on the actions of specific companies in combating corruption. The report will assess big oil, gas and mining companies on their readiness to publish information on their revenue flows in energy projects, especially in developing countries. Mr de Swardt — a 45-year-old South African and former anti-apartheid campaigner — said it was ‘quite incredible’ that many companies were ‘resistant to publishing this information.’ Extractive industry companies had lobbied TI to withhold or water down the report, people familiar with the issue said.⁸

This interview triggered rapid reactions within the Board and movement. Before I even saw a copy of the interview, some Board members and TI-USA wanted me fired. There were also attempts from within the TI movement to stop TI-S’ work on the upcoming report on oil, gas and mining companies. However, the skilful leadership of the Board provided by Huguette Labelle and Akere Muna (2006–2014) navigated us through this storm and several future ones. TI now worked within the corridors of power, as well as holding the powerful to account by linking grass roots actions against corruption and the corrupt more directly than in the