Global Corruption Busters: How development aid can boost the UK’s fight against dirty money

Corruption costs lives in developing countries and the UK is part of the problem. Its army of ‘professional enablers’ (including bankers, lawyers, estate agents and accountants) help to launder and hide money stolen from developing countries, whilst UK companies hand out bribes to access lucrative resources and contracts.

These actions harm the poorest people in the world, draining badly needed resources and sustaining corrupt systems. They also threaten the UK’s long-term commercial and security interests by weakening trade partners and contributing to conflict and instability overseas. At the same time, the UK aims to reduce global poverty through its international development work and aid spending. But these good intentions are undermined when UK companies and business people get away with facilitating or engaging in international corruption and allow political figures to move their corrupt assets to the UK.

This report looks at the work of the International Corruption Unit (ICU) in the National Crime Agency (NCA) which is at the heart of UK enforcement in relation to developing country corruption. This law enforcement unit’s existence is an explicit and welcome recognition that the UK cannot talk about corruption in developing countries without tackling its own role in facilitating it. Uniquely, the ICU is primarily funded from the UK’s aid budget.

The report lays out what aid funding for law enforcement looks like, what it has achieved – particularly the record of the ICU since it was established in 2015 – and what the lessons are so far. Overall, we find that the ICU, working with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), has delivered extremely welcome and valuable enforcement outcomes in recent years.

However, current enforcement capabilities fall far short of what is needed to deal with the UK’s role in developing country corruption. To close the gap, we put forward eight specific measures to strengthen the programme and enhance aid-funded enforcement.