Political corruption can be spotted across the world, and so far the focus on this blog has been on Eastern European kind, but it need not remain this way. An interesting news item by Richard Spencer for The Telegraph talks about anticorruption efforts in China that rely on mistresses (Chinese officials’ corruption exposed by mistresses).
The Chinese, it seems, have noticed a not so surprising link between graft and keeping an expensive secret lifestyle. So having recognized that, here is what Beijing did (ingenious really):
Last year new rules came into effect demanding that officials register their girlfriends and stipulating that any who keep them secret must be sacked.
This yielded quite a few results:
The head of the national statistics bureau who was accused of taking bribes to keep a “second wife” and their child in Shanghai, or the most senior Olympics-related figure to have fallen from grace. The vice-mayor of Beijing in charge of Olympic-related construction was found to have a secret luxury villa packed with concubines, paid for with extensive bribes.
The corrupt officials got around anticorruption laws by using payments disguised as financial instruments. For example, a bribe can be given in a form of share dividends to someone who is not a shareholder.
No doubt, this anticorruption approach can work not only in the Far East, but in the states of Europe.
