One hour, eighteen minutes is the amount of time that remains unaccounted for between a doctor being called to treat Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian prison and the time Magnitsky, a lawyer, was pronounced dead. It is also the name of a new play by Elena Gremina – a play that portrays accounts, from his supporters and from his own diary entries, of events in the year leading up to his death. The play uses as background official reports that were either public or dug up by supporters.

Sergei Magnitsky, a 37-year old father of two, died just under a year after being held on tax evasion and fraud charges.  Former colleagues say the charges were fabricated by police investigators he had accused of stealing $230 million from the Russian state through fraudulent tax refunds.

While Magnitsky’s death was officially attributed to an undetected illness, the Kremlin’s own human rights council has said he was probably beaten to death.

His story has gained international prominence due to the campaigning efforts of his friends, family and former colleagues.

And U.S. lawmakers, urged on by Magnitsky’s supporters, have drafted legislation named after the lawyer that would impose sanctions on Russian officials involved in human rights violations.

First produced in Russia in 2010, the play arrived in the UK this year in a translated and updated version, with the Sputnik theatre company’s Noah Birksted-Breen as director, translator and co-producer.

For those familiar with the story, the play does not provide much new information. But for the audience, the visual representation of the story brings out an emotional response they may not get as powerfully from reading documents and accounts.

The actors, Alan Francis, Wendy Nottingham, Rebecca Peyton and Danny Scheinmann, each play several characters.  This difficult task is rendered smooth by excellent acting, a range of UK accents (but no faux Russian ones) and quick costume changes.

At various times during the play, one of the actors brandishes a video camera which projects live onto a screen above the stage. During these scenes when a character interviews officials implicated in Magnitsky’s death, the interviewer zooms in close on the faces of the accused. At once, the interview becomes an interrogation.

The claustrophobically small stage lends the play an intimacy that enhances its shocking brutality. In one scene a policeman savagely beats another character, a colleague of Magnitsky’s. The smacks of flesh on flesh and the resulting cries made the audience flinch noticeably.

One Hour Eighteen Minutes is showing now at the New Diorama Theatre in London and runs until Dec. 1.

A new hard-hitting advocacy video highlights the success of a project at a Uganda primary school where students monitored the attendance rates of their instructors to try and reduce teacher absenteeism.

Uganda has the worst teacher absenteeism rate in the world, according to Anslem Wandega, a program manager at African Network for the Prevention and Protection against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN), which oversaw the project with funding from the Results for Development Institute (R4D) in Washington, D.C.

Following the success of the monitoring project in Uganda’s Iganga school district, ANPPCAN intends to use the video to persuade other school districts to take up the project, Courtney Heck, a senior program associate in R4D’s Transparency and Accountability Program, said.

Uganda has had universal free primary education since 1997.

Tapping student leaders to help address teacher absenteeism in Uganda from Results for Development on Vimeo.

Picture credit: A sign hangs from a tree at the Saint Peter’s Roman Catholic Primary School in Nsambya, on the outskirts of Kampala in this file picture. REUTERS/Dylan Martinez

By Luke Balleny

‘Share and share alike,’ some parents love to tell their offspring. But when it comes to fines or settlements from foreign bribery cases, the issue of sharing is a contentious one.

The U.S. government receives all proceeds from fines or settlements that companies pay it in connection with violations, or alleged violations, of U.S. anti-bribery laws.

But would the country ever share the proceeds of such fines or settlements with governmental and non-governmental groups working in the countries where the bribery allegedly occurred?

A Nigerian accountability watchdog, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), wrote to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on the issue last month.

In its letter, SERAP asked for the the U.S. financial regulator’s enforcement division to establish a case-by-case policy or process that would:

“…enable foreign governmental entities that have been victims of corruptly-procured contracts to apply for, subject to appropriate anti-corruption safeguards, some or all of the civil penalty and disgorgement proceeds that would eventually be paid by companies alleged to have violated the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”

SERAP also suggested in the letter that: “civil society groups in the home country, or U.S. non-profit organisations serving that country, be eligible within a short time period to apply for such proceeds as well…”

So, what did the SEC make of SERAP’s request?

“We … will give appropriate consideration to your suggestions, guided by the Commission’s multi-prolonged mission, as well as the legal framework surrounding the federal securities laws,” SERAP has quoted the SEC’s enforcement division director, Robert Khuzami, as saying in a letter.

Every year the United States collects billions of dollars from FCPA sanctions – the FCPA being a U.S. law barring bribes to officials of foreign governments.

And the SERAP letter is not the first attempt by foreign parties to seek funds from Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) settlements in the United States.

WHO’S THE VICTIM?

But some experts indicate the United States is unlikely to meet SERAP’s demands.

“I think it’s unlikely that U.S. enforcement authorities would share U.S. penalties with other countries, as U.S. penalties are intended to serve U.S. enforcement objectives and arise under various U.S. statutory schemes,” said Jay Holtmeier, an FCPA expert and a partner at global law firm WilmerHale.

“That said, we have seen much more cooperation in recent years between global enforcement authorities, which means that U.S. authorities likely would assist Nigerian or other authorities in building cases to pursue penalties in their local courts, and U.S. authorities have, and presumably will continue in the future, to consider penalties already assessed by other authorities when determining appropriate penalties in the United States.”

SERAP says that corruption is not a victimless crime and that consequently a portion of a fine should be returned to the country in which the bribe took place.

“Procurement and investment agreements corrupted by foreign bribery invariably lead to increased costs, not only in higher prices but also in needlessly expanded and ultimately inefficient projects in victimised societies,” SERAP said in its March letter to the SEC. “This has often been the case in Nigeria, where damage remedies are often elusive,” the letter added.

But some say that deciphering who the victims are is a tricky matter.

“The determination of who has true victim status can be a complex and challenging one,” said Lucinda Low, a partner at Steptoe & Johnson.

“When is an entity a victim and when is it a co-perpetrator?  And on what basis could or should the U.S. government determine that a self-appointed NGO, even a worthy one with a strong anti-corruption programme, be an appropriate recipient of funds?” she added.

Although SERAP’s proposal “feels good,” individuals or organisations located in the country giving rise to any particular FCPA enforcement action are not really the most direct victims of the conduct at issue, said Mike Koehler, an assistant professor of business law at Butler University in the United States.

“It would seem that in most instances competitors who may have lost out on the foreign business because it was unwilling to make an improper payment are the most direct victims. If so, perhaps the attention to victim issues should renew interest in an FCPA private right of action,” Koehler said.

So, would the U.S. government ever change its policy on retaining all proceeds from fines and settlements?

For now, it’s still a case of wait and see…

The “Arab Spring” was fuelled in part by popular desire to weed out corruption. But could graft in fact be on the rise in Egypt and Tunisia?

It could indeed be rising massively, according to Nicola Ehlermann-Cache, a senior policy analyst at the Paris-based think-tank, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

“Unfortunately, informal reports have been made to me – certainly in Tunisia, Egypt and Iraq – (by) people claiming that corruption is rising tremendously,” she said last week as a panelist at the International Bar Association’s (IBA) annual Anti-Corruption Conference in Paris.

Ehlermann-Cache painted a bleak picture of the state of corruption in the North Africa and the Middle East (MENA). Issues of particular concern, she said, were poorly written laws, ongoing immunity for influential officials, media restrictions, no right to access public information and weak institutions.

Tunisia’s and Egypt’s former leaders are being held to account. Tunisia’s Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali, is living in Saudi Arabia where he fled at the height of the protests. In July last year, a Tunisian court sentenced him in absentia to 16 years in jail, on charges of corruption and ordered that he pay 97 million dinars ($70.65 million) in fines.

Hosni Mubarak, meanwhile, is living in a military hospital in Egypt waiting to hear whether he has been found guilty of corruption and of ordering the killing of protesters in the uprising that swept him from power.

Can it really be so that the uprisings could have fanned yet more graft?

Riccardo Fabiani, a North Africa analyst at political risk consultancy Eurasiagroup, said it could be a matter of smaller-scale corruption rising – not larger-scale.

“Large-scale corruption (in Tunisia) has now gone, as the current authorities are not in a position to take bribes from investors because of the intense scrutiny they are under after the January 2011 revolution,” Fabiani said.

“That said, it is fair to assume that small-scale corruption, i.e. bribes taken by local policemen or bureaucrats etc., has not disappeared and has possibly increased,” he added.

“As living conditions continue to deteriorate and unemployment (continues) to go up, these people resort to corruption to support their incomes.”

Firas Abi Ali, deputy head of MENA forecasting at another consultancy Exclusive Analysis, disagreed with Ehlermann-Cache’s comments. Overall, corruption has decreased in Egypt and Tunisia, due to the destruction of the patronage networks that had been fuelled by the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt respectively, he said.

But, as Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, a Tunisia analyst at consultancy Control Risk said, it’s still early days to monitor corruption in Tunisia and Egypt after the revolutions.

“Corruption is opaque by nature, and the most reliable evidence of it lies in occasional corruption scandals or accusations that break out,” he said. “Given how fresh the new regimes are in Tunisia and Egypt, there has been little time for them to break out, and we only have anecdotal evidence.”

Measurements of corruption are notoriously difficult to make and estimations, as the above shows, can differ according to who you talk to. But if corruption really is on the increase in Egypt and Tunisia, one difference is this time Egyptians and Tunisians will be able to vote for change.