United in Greed: Will the Pandora Papers Change Anything About Corruption in Asia?
Thumbnail: Transparency International, CC BY 4.0
“It’s not enough for people,” says a civil servant in Ashgabat, about the tiny subsidised food portions citizens must queue hours for. The lucrative $25.7 million contract for the food imports was awarded by Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov to his nephew, Hajymyrat Rejepov, who then went on to build a luxury mansion in the expensive Gazha district. While the people suffer with hyperinflation and rations, Turkmenistan’s leader steals and abuses his power to enrich himself and his family.
The Pandora Papers are the largest data leak of its kind in history, exposing corruption at the heart of governments across the world. However, while its revelations are damning, graft across Asia is a constant plague that has repeatedly been exposed over the years and has repeatedly bounced back. To understand if the Papers will make a difference, the revelations must be put in context. For instance, Rejepov and his brother, Shamyrat, were exposed by the Papers as being the secret beneficiaries of two UK-based companies selling state petrochemicals from Turkmenistan, in addition to the food imports scandal – from the fact they hid their money in 16 luxury Dubai apartments, it is clear that anti-corruption is an uphill struggle.
Culture of Corruption
Malaysia, Pakistan, Lebanon, The Philippines
When former Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin appointed Tengku Zafrul Aziz as his finance minister in early 2020, the irony was not immediately obvious. Muhyiddin previously fell out with prime minister-turned-defendant Najib Razak over the alleged corruption scandal 1MDB that saw Najib lose power in 2018. Then just three years later, the Pandora Papers would expose Tengku Zafrul’s link to an offshore investment bank based in Labuan. The “anti-corruption PM” had appointed a corrupt minister. Unfortunately, this sort of irony is very commonplace in Asia.
“We welcome the Pandora Papers exposing the ill-gotten wealth of elites,” tweeted Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, who came to power in 2018 on a strong anti-corruption platform. These “elites”, however, also include Moonis Elahi, his water resources minister, Shaukat Tarin, his finance minister, and Arif Naqvi, a key donor, among other associates. The 2016 corruption data leak, the Panama Papers, exposed former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s illegal finances and saw him convicted by the Supreme Court in 2017. Khan spearheaded the legal campaign against Sharif and used it to win power the following year. He has been praised by many for cutting expenses and increasing public service spending, but the revelation that his key allies are guilty of the main thing he has been trying to fight is a heavy blow that only exacerbates his government’s flaws: namely, fear over how much influence the military truly has. That Elahi and his father, Chaudhry Pervais, were key political allies of former President Pervez Musharraf (the military ruler from 1999-2008) displays an unusual vulnerability to the military. The deciding factor will be how Khan reacts. Regardless of Khan’s personal animosity towards corrupt elites, giving a pass to families like the Elahis under military pressure will only undermine him. But punishing them makes an enemy of the military and looking back at the last 70 years or so, Pakistani history doesn’t end well for prime ministers who oppose the military.
No food. No water. No power. Lebanon's poorly designed political system has enabled widespread corruption to gradually degrade public services and weaken the economy, so the shock of the Syrian civil war and subsequent financial crisis has led to a rapid deterioration in living conditions. After an explosion at the port of Beirut in August 2020 killed 218, displaced 300,000 and destroyed the primary source of food imports, widespread protests erupted calling for the system to be dismantled. A second explosion in Tleil in August 2021 and firefights on the streets have escalated the situation. But how did the system lead here, and how are the Pandora Papers relevant? In brief, to ensure religious tolerance, the system makes the president a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of the house a Shia Muslim. The Taif Agreement that ended the bloody civil war divided parliament into religious groups which allowed militia leaders and oligarchs to entrench themselves at the top of their respective factions. Power was usually handed down from father to son. Each group essentially became a fiefdom based on patronage and self-enrichment. Any attempt to criticise one section of government became tantamount to attacking the entire religious sect it belonged to, meaning reform became excruciatingly difficult. With successive governments collapsing in recent years, technocrat Najib Mikati was appointed in 2021 to oversee talks with the IMF and bring some stability - now that the Papers have exposed his secret $8 million Monaco property, it has never been clearer to the Lebanese people that drastic reform is needed to bring hope back to the country.
Instead of hope, in the Philippines, it was Juan Andres Donato Bautista’s job to bring back the billions stolen by Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos during their kleptocratic dictatorship from 1965 to 1986. As head of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, Bautista led the search to recover the stolen funds, but at the same time, created a shell company in the Caribbean linked to a Singaporean bank account allegedly hoarding millions of dollars. It doesn’t help to have a crook leading the anti-crook taskforce, though this is a common characteristic across the continent. Although the Philippines has made commendable strides in tackling white-collar crime by improving regulations, as activist Mae Buenaventura highlighted: many Filipinos “know that the wealthy have ways and means to accumulate riches and also hide them in a way that ordinary people cannot get their hands on.”
Long Live the Soviet Union
Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Sri Lanka
The Chinese enjoy more civil liberties under Xi Jinping than Azerbaijanis do under Ilham Aliyev, according to Freedom House. Central Asian governments have long been condemned as corrupt and authoritarian and whilst they are each distinct nations, there is a common pattern: they were all once Soviet Socialist Republics. The same bureaucracy, censorship, shortages and corruption that would have been found in Moscow or Kyiv in the late 1970s have been inherited by ex-Soviet states in Asia, enabling leaders like Aliyev to engage in Brezhnev-style self-enrichment at the cost of working people just getting by in Baku. The Papers exposed Aliyev’s $700 million hidden in London properties, but with Azerbaijan’s recent victory against Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, strengthening his alliances in Ankara, Tel Aviv and Moscow, it is unlikely that he will be held accountable anytime soon.
It is safe to say that when Jambyn Batmönkh succeeded Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal as General Secretary of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party in 1984, he didn’t anticipate the collapse of the Politburo within six years – but he is often praised for allowing Mongolia’s democratic transition to take its course peacefully. Mongolia is a fast-developing country with a rich history and culture, famed worldwide, but as the Pandora Papers have shown, even decades after the end of the Soviet satellite state, patterns of corruption continue. The fact that former Prime Ministers Sükhbaataryn Batbold of the communist-successor People’s Party and Chimed Saikhanbileg of the centre-right Democrat Party were both exposed shows that Soviet-style graft is not exclusive to any one party but a pervasive threat to Mongolia’s young democracy.
Shortages of food, higher prices for essentials - though never part of the USSR, many Asian nations suffer from similar economic difficulties to those of Eastern Europe in the 1980s, such as high debt levels. One example is Sri Lanka, where an oligopoly of private rice millers is often accused of deliberately hoarding to increase food prices. On an island country already struggling economically before the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these issues, nothing helps people less than Soviet-style corruption among the elites with the Pandora Papers exposing the embezzlement and fraud that several members of the ruling Rajapaksa family are guilty of. No other family has had as much influence on Sri Lankan history as that of Mahinda Rajapaksa, called "The Terminator" for his brutal tactics against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during the 26-year civil war that ended a decade ago. After the war, Rajapaksa became president and appointed his brothers, Gotabaya and Basil, along with other family members, like his cousin Nirupama, to his cabinet. The Rajapaksas themselves controlled 70% of the entire national budget. Despite the Papers exposing Nirupama and her husband for establishing shell companies to hide millions of dollars in assets like luxury Sydney properties or priceless paintings while the island was being torn apart by a civil war, the investigation has now been dropped. That this happened shortly after Gotabaya was elected president and then appointed his brother Mahinda as prime minister in 2019 is yet another obstacle to transparency and fairness in government.
The Ones that Got Away
Afghanistan and the Rest
The Papers are not a tell-all about corruption in Asia - in fact, they're actually a tell-very-little. Financial misconduct by ruling elites is only a small part of the much wider problem faced by most Asian countries. It's a problem evidenced by Transparency International's labelling of India as having the highest rate of bribery on the continent, with 42% paying off the police and 46% using personal connections to access better public services like education and healthcare.
The problem is that if the elites at the top are corrupt, those one step down the hierarchy turn to criminal activities to keep themselves going, and so on until the whole system is infested. Nowhere is this more evident than Afghanistan where arguably corruption singlehandedly allowed the Taliban to return to power earlier this year. The BBC reported that 300,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers of the US-backed government from 2001-2021 did not actually exist but were "ghost soldiers", a very common method of embezzling funds. This gives us some insight into the rampant institutionalised corruption under Presidents Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani enabled by Western powers. Those soldiers who did exist were not being paid and were fighting the Taliban with inadequate resources. Many questioned how the Taliban took over Afghanistan so fast - well, among other things, Afghan troops were not actually paid.
When placed in context, the Pandora Papers suggest that in spite of all revelations, no real change is going to come. An optimist, however, will point out that Asian people have just as much will as anyone else to see positive improvements in their country - and with enough evidence of the endemic problems in the system to unify the people, the more likely it is that something will actually change.
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