Officials in leading world economies are squabbling about an international anti-graft deal that campaigners and the World Bank say is crucial to efforts to recover funds looted by corrupt leaders and salted overseas.
Western nations including Britain have been battling China and a number of other countries over a United Nations anti-corruption convention whose terms are supposed to be finalised at a summit in Qatar this week, say people familiar with the talks.
The UN agreement is widely seen as key to the international fight against graft as it is global in reach and focuses partly on practical methods to achieve the return of assets stolen from poor countries.
Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, urged member states to do a deal to prevent the convention becoming “a historic opportunity badly missed”.
He said: “I think it would be a major disappointment to a lot of people – taxpayers, victims of corruption and, of course, us – if no agreement was reached.”
Disputes around the Qatar meeting had focused on the way compliance with the convention was re-viewed and monitored, Mr Costa said.
Countries including China, Pakistan and Egypt had expressed concerns over the degree of non-governmental group involvement in the process, how intrusive it would prove and how public the results would be, said other people familiar with the talks. No representatives of the three countries named could be reached for comment.
Mr Costa declined to discuss individual countries, saying only that he did not want the convention to become a convoy that travelled “at the speed of the slowest ship”.
“Different societies have different reactions to this,” he said. “So all of this will have to be taken into account.”
One reason the convention is seen as an important tool is that it has been ratified by 141 countries, against only the few dozen industrialised nations signed up to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s anti-bribery treaty. Another is that the convention is much wider in scope than the OECD agreement, laying down mechanisms for international law enforcement co-operation, information exchange and asset recovery in future cases.
The convention has won the backing of senior business leaders, 24 of whom – including Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric and Tianwen Huang of Sinosteel Corporation – have signed a letter calling for the Doha meeting to set up a credible review process.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a managing director at the World Bank, which is co-leading an international project to recover stolen official funds, said nervousness about the convention review process was understandable, but should not be allowed to block efforts.
