Corruption and institutional decay

William Browder, founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005, when he was denied entry to the country for exposing corruption in Russian state-owned companies.

In 2009 his Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was killed in a Moscow prison after uncovering and exposing a US$230 million fraud committed by Russian government officials. Because of their impunity in Russia, Browder has spent the last eight years conducting a global campaign to impose visa bans and asset freezes on individual human rights abusers, particularly those who played a role in Magnitsky’s false arrest, torture and death.

The USA was the first to impose these sanctions with the passage of the 2012 “Magnitsky Act.” A Global Magnitsky Bill, which broadens the scope of the US Magnitsky Act to human rights abusers around the world, was passed at the end of 2016. The UK passed a Magnitsky amendment in April 2017. Magnitsky legislation was passed in Estonia in December 2016, Canada in October 2017 and in Lithuania in November 2017. Similar legislation is being developed in Australia, France, Denmark, Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden and Ukraine.

In February 2015 Browder published the New York Times bestseller, Red Notice, which recounts his experience in Russia and his ongoing fight for justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

David Gergen is a professor of public service and was the founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. In addition, he serves as a senior political analyst for CNN and works actively with a rising generation of new leaders. In the past, he has served as a White House adviser to four U.S. presidents of both parties: Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. He wrote about those experiences in his New York Times best-seller, Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton (Simon & Schuster, 2001).

In the 1980s, he began a career in journalism. Starting with the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour in 1984, Professor Gergen has been a regular commentator on public affairs for some 30 years. Twice he has been a member of election coverage teams that won Peabody awards, and he has contributed to two Emmy award-winning political analysis teams. In the late 1980s, he was chief editor of U.S. News & World Report, working with publisher Mort Zuckerman to achieve record gains in circulation and advertising.

Over the years, Professor Gergen has been active on many non-profit boards, serving in the past on the boards of both Yale and Duke Universities. Among his current boards are The Mission Continues, The Trilateral Commission, and Elon University’s School of Law. 
 

Shan Aman-Rana is a development economist interested in understanding the state capacity constraint on development. Her research mainly focuses on organizational economics of public sector workers in developing countries. Her current research investigates discretionary allocations in a bureaucracy in Pakistan and shows that when senior bureaucrats have the discretion to promote juniors, they do so meritocratically.

Aman-Rana’s research has been funded by STICERD and International Growth Centre (IGC) in the UK, Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS) in Pakistan and United States Institute of Peace. She was awarded Best Teaching Fellow Award in the Economics Tripos (2012-13) and University of Cambridge and London School of Economics (LSE) Best Class Teacher Award (2016). She was also nominated for LSE's student-led Most Inspirational Teacher Award (2016).

She holds a Ph.D, MRes, and MSc. in economics from LSE. Before coming to the UK, she worked as a Pakistan Administrative Services (PAS) bureaucrat collecting taxes, adjudicating on revenue matters, and dealing with complaints of the citizens against the political establishment, among other things. She is affiliated with STICERD, Economic Organisation and Public Policy Programme (EOPP) LSE, International Growth Centre (IGC), and Bissau Economics Lab (BELAB). At the University of Virginia, she is part of the Democracy Initiative. 

Kara Brockmeyer is a litigation partner based in the firm’s Washington D.C. office. She is a member of the White Collar Regulatory Defense and Strategic Crisis Response and Solutions Groups, where her practice focuses on representing companies and individuals in anti-corruption, fraud and related government investigations and internal investigations, as well as advising on deal due diligence and compliance matters.

Prior to joining Debevoise in 2017, Ms. Brockmeyer served as the Chief of the SEC Enforcement Division’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Unit and directed a nationwide team of attorneys and forensic accountants investigating violations of the FCPA. During her tenure as chief of the unit, she oversaw many of the agency’s largest and most complex FCPA investigations. She was also one of the principal authors of the SEC-DOJ Resource Guide to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which is widely considered the definitive government-issued guide on the FCPA.

Michael Gilbert teaches courses on election law, legislation, and law and economics. His current research focuses on constitutional entrenchment, campaign finance law, corruption and the design of courts. He is working on a book-length project on public law and economics. His research has appeared in multiple law reviews, peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, and he has lectured throughout the United States and around the world, including in Ecuador, Germany and Israel. Prior to joining the faculty, Gilbert clerked for Judge William A. Fletcher on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. He received his Ph.D. from the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the University of California, Berkeley, and he received his J.D. from Berkeley Law School. At Berkeley, Gilbert served as an articles editor on the California Law Review and received multiple distinctions, including an Olin Fellowship in Law and Economics and a grant from the National Science Foundation. In 2015 he won the UVA Student Council Distinguished Teaching Award.

Daniel W. Gingerich is associate professor of politics specializing in comparative politics at the University of Virginia. He is also Director of UVA’s Quantitative Collaborative and co-director of UVa-Clear (Corruption Laboratory for Ethics, Accountability, and the Rule of Law). Gingerich’s research focuses on understanding the causes and consequences of corruption and clientelism in Latin America as well as developing new methodologies to study these phenomena.  He has published articles in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, Comparative Political Studies, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and the British Journal of Political Science, among others. He is the author of Political Institutions and Party-Directed Corruption in South America: Stealing for the Team (Cambridge University Press, series: Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions). Gingerich’s current research examines how the transition from the nominal to effective secret vote shapes the nature of political representation by focusing on the historical experience of Brazil before and after the introduction of the Australian Ballot.

Deborah Hellman is the D. Lurton Massee Professor of Law and the Roy L. and Rosamond Woodruff Morgan Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law.  Her two main scholarly interests are discrimination and corruption.  She is the author of A Theory of Bribery, 38 Cardozo L. Rev. 1947 (2017), which was awarded the Fred Berger Memorial Prize by the American Philosophical Association.  Her other corruption related work includes Defining Corruption and Constitutionalizing Democracy, 111 Mich. L. Rev. 1385 (2013), Money Talks But It Isn’t Speech, 95 Minn. L. Rev. 953 (2011), Liberty, Equality, Bribery, and Self-Government: Reframing the Campaign Finance Debatein Democracy by the People: Reforming Campaign Finance in America(Kuhner & Mazo eds., Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018) and the forthcoming Understanding Bribery, in The Ethics of Criminal Law (Ferzan &Alexander eds., Palgrave McMillan Press, forthcoming 2019).  Hellman is a member of the Board of Directors of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan group, nonprofit organization that holds candidates and government officials accountable regardless of political affiliation.

Philip Keefer is principal advisor of the Institutions for Development Department of the Inter-American Development Bank. He was formerly a lead research economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. The focus of his work, based on experience in countries ranging from Bangladesh, Benin, Burkina Faso, Indonesia, and Pakistan to Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, México, and Perú, is the determinants of political incentives to pursue economic development and of public officials to work in the public interest. His research, on issues such as the impact of insecure property rights on growth; the effects of political credibility on policy; the sources of political credibility in democracies and autocracies; the influence of political parties on conflict, political budget cycles, and public sector reform; and the effects of compensation on the effort and intrinsic motivation of public officials, has appeared in journals ranging from the Quarterly Journal of Economics to the American Political Science Review.

Stephen D. Mull is Vice Provost for Global Affairs at the University of Virginia. In this role he is the primary lead on global relations at the University, responsible for developing a strategic vision, designing outreach, and overseeing international activities. Steve will oversee institutional development of global partnerships and develop a wide array of services, programs, experiences, and strategic partnerships that promote global imagination within the university community.

Mull has served in a broad range of U.S. national security positions, most recently as Acting Under Secretary for Political Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, working as the day-to-day manager of overall regional and bilateral policy issues, and overseeing the bureaus for Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Eurasia, the Near East, South and Central Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and International Organizations. He served as Lead Coordinator for Iran Nuclear Implementation from August 2015 until August 2017, in which capacity he led U.S. government interagency efforts and diplomacy to implement the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Mull was the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Poland from 2012 until 2015 and U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Lithuania from 2003 to 2006. He has been both Executive Secretary of the State Department and the Senior Advisor to Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. He has also recently served as Resident Senior Fellow at Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy.

David Singerman is a historian of science and technology, capitalism, and the environment. His current research examines the American sugar empire of the late 19th century, showing how corruption and monopoly power in the United States were shaped by struggles for control of labor and nature in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. 

He has also written on doping in professional cycling, trade wars over frozen fish, and the reproducibility crisis in contemporary science. In addition to peer-reviewed articles, Singerman's work has appeared in The New York Times and online in The Atlantic.

His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Chemical Heritage Foundation, among others. He received his PhD from MIT in 2014 and in 2015 his dissertation was awarded prizes for best dissertation in business history by both the Business History Conference (US) and the Association of Business Historians (UK). Before coming to UVA he was a postdoctoral associate at Rutgers University and a research associate at Harvard Business School.

Sandip Sukhtankar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Virginia and an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) and the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2009, and a BA from Swarthmore College (with Highest Honors) in 2000. Prof Sukhtankar’s research interests are in development economics, political economy, and public economics, with a particular focus on corruption, governance, and the delivery of public benefits and services. Prof Sukhtankar’s research has been published in top economics journals such as the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics,andthe Journal of Public Economics.His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Sylvia Tidey is an assistant professor at UVA with a joint position in the anthropology department and the global studies program. Her general research interests revolve around possibilities for reimagining the good life outside of globally circulating hegemonic visions of the good—whether these are connected to ideas on governance or health. Her research projects take place in Indonesia and are situated temporally in the post-authoritarian era called Reformasi, which is an ongoing period of uncertain state reformation in which the exact form that the Indonesian state and its ideology of governance may take remains split between a desire for a continuation of authoritarian impulses, a push for liberal democracy, and the rising influence of hardliner Islamists. In her work on corruption, she attends to the effects of anti-corruption efforts on civil service corruption in eastern Indonesian government where attempts to establish “Good Governance” actually facilitated a continuation of existing as well as emergence of new forms of corruption. By taking an ethnographically rooted approach, Sylvia investigates this conundrum in order to propose an alternative vision of what counts as a governmental good.

Jessica Ann Levy is a historian of 20th-century American business, politics, and racism in the U.S. and Africa. Her current book project, Black Power, Inc.: Corporate America, Race, and Empowerment Politics (under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press), examines the transnational rise of black empowerment, including private and government programs promoting black entrepreneurship, vocational training, and community development, in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa during the late twentieth-century. Levy is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including from the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, the Jefferson Scholars/Hagley Library, the German Historical Institute, as well as numerous library grants and fellowships. Her work has appeared in various academic and public venues, including Enterprise & Society, Journal of Urban History, and The Washington Post. In August 2019, Levy will return to Charlottesville to serve as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of History and the Corruption Lab on Ethics, Accountability, and the Rule of Law (part of the Democracy Initiative). Levy received her Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University. She holds an M.A. from The University of Chicago and a B.A. from Emory University.