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- Sorry seems to be the hardest word… - 28th May 2025
During 23 years with the BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, it has always been problematic to prove corruption, although he knew it went on. Today as a Bank Holiday read, he examines the new research showing that corruption has now moved on to an official kind from rotten governments – called ‘state capture’.
In all the investigations I have undertaken over the years, the most difficult ones are to prove corruption.
In fact it almost never happened (the stories I mean!).
You might know it is going on, but showing it to the satisfaction of lawyers is another matter entirely.
Necessarily what is happening is under the radar (cash payments in brown envelopes to a public official in order to get planning permission, for example), so they didn’t leave a communication trail.
It might have been agreed during a conversation in a pub, and there would be nothing written down.
You can only prove it in two ways:
- With a recorded conversation or secret filming.
- With a huge number of witnesses who didn’t know each other, but all saw money changing hands, and were saying exactly the same thing.
Even then, though, the results might not stand up in court – so the offender would walk free, and you might be landed with a hefty legal bill.
I started writing these kind of pieces during my early days in journalism, but it is even harder now because research shows that corruption has moved on to the official state kind, known as ‘state capture’.
This is when the powers and resources of the state are hijacked for the benefit of a few, and any money (or equivalents) are just seen as fruits the person in charge has a right to harvest.
We are talking here about billions of pounds which might be taken out of state coffers and given to cronies of whoever happens to be the leader, which could be even more difficult to prove because not only do you have to show it is going on, using the tools I mentioned, but the courts TOO might be corrupt, with the judges friends of the individual in control so they may not accept your evidence anyway!
It might sound arcane to start discussing it in the way I have done, but the following could be a model of what may go on here in future – the example of Bangladesh.
Since Ahsan Mansur, the governor of Bangladesh’s central bank, took over in August, after an autocratic Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, was overthrown by protests, his job has been to untangle the criminal mess she left behind.
Connected tycoons schemed with military-intelligence agents to loot the banking system, Mr Mansur says, siphoning away $21 billion.
Spy agencies helped the tycoons forcibly to take over banks and then issue loans to their new shareholders, which were not repaid, alleges Mr Mansur.
On some occasions, he says, agents seized board members from their homes and forced them at gunpoint to resign.
State capture is a broader concept than corruption, since it includes acts that are not against the law, but should be.
It can involve rewriting rules to benefit insiders, stuffing institutions with placemen, channelling favours to cronies, intimidating businesses into appeasing the powerful, and ruining a system of checks and balances.
The aim may be self-enrichment, or strengthening the captor’s grip on power, or both, and the threat appears to be growing.
The world’s most disruptive state of late, Russia, is treated as private property by Vladimir Putin.
China boasts of progress against corruption under President Xi Jinping, but state capture in the country has actually become worse!
The elephant in the room is, of course, the United States of America (USA), which is at risk of two kinds of state capture: a president asserting powers he shouldn’t have, and moguls such as Elon Musk acquiring unwarranted sway.
As this shows we shouldn’t rest on our laurels in the developed west, because our institutions are relatively strong, since in Donald Trump we have a president who is intent on upsetting the world order with his ridiculous use of tariffs.
So journalists like me have a vital role to play in keeping an eye on things, because it might not all be about brown envelopes stuffed with money now…
The memories of Phil’s astonishing, decades long award-winning career in journalism (when corruption was incredibly difficult to prove) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in the book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
Tomorrow – why reports that disgraced Go Compare frontman Wynne Evans was carpeted by his BBC bosses over a sex toy video as well as being axed from the airwaves (including his BBC Radio Wales (RW) show) because of his behaviour, and the latest news about controversial Russell Brand, highlight once more the corporation’s REFUSAL to answer our questions over how many programmes cannot now be transmitted.
