The World Bank is considering establishing a global witness protection programme as part of its mission to root out fraud from its own operations and from the countries in which it operates.
The scheme would protect whistleblowers who have been reluctant to come forward and provide information to the bank because they are concerned for their own safety.
The idea, which is still on the drawing board, is part of an anti-corruption plan set out by Leonard McCarthy, the Bank’s vice-president for integrity.
“We have cases where we put people in the voluntary disclosure programme, where they give us good business insights – but don’t want their identity revealed because they fear for their safety,” he told Emerging Markets in an interview.
In one instance within the last week the unit, known as INT, had to stop a case because a witness “feared for their life”, McCarthy said. “The witness asked ‘can you help me?’ and we said ‘we can’t help you.’
“We don’t have that facility at the moment. Some people might say it would be a little out of kilter for a development organisation. But if we are serious about fighting corruption, we need to put something in place.”
McCarthy envisages a small international structure that would enable the INT to relocate a witness if the facts of the case justified the cost, and depending on local conditions.
Another proposal, revealed in the INT annual report made available to Emerging Markets ahead of publication on Friday, is an anti-corruption fund that would pool resources raised from fines and sanctions.
The fund is also only at an embryonic stage but is an “important concept”. “The concept of giving something back to affected communities who have borne the brunt of corruption is for me the definitive principle”, McCarthy said.
The idea was partly inspired by successful cases such as a negotiated settlement this year with C Lotti, an Italian engineering firm, which agreed to pay $350,000 in restitution to Indonesia. Last year Macmillan Publishers paid £1 million to the UK government over unlawful conduct in an education project in South Sudan.
McCarthy, who headed up the Directorate of Special Operations, the South African corruption unit, before taking the INT job in 2008, agreed that these two measures could put him at the centre of the global fight against corruption.
In the year to June 2011 INT opened 73 new cases, compared with 194 in the previous year. But the share of those in which allegations were substantiated by an investigation rose to 68% from 18%. It closed 83 cases out of a total of 460 allegations and complaints, of which 369 involved a Bank-supported activity.
INT set up an international network of corruption fighters, the Corruption Hunters Alliance, in December last year. It also launched a preventive anti-corruption strategy on the recommendation of an independent commission.