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Defence Companies Index on Anti-Corruption and Corporate Transparency 2020: Key Findings

The Defence Companies Index on Anti-Corruption and Corporate Transparency (DCI) assesses the level of commitment to transparency and anti-corruption standards in 134 of the world’s largest defence companies across 38 countries. Data from the DCI 2020 reveals that although most of the world’s largest defence companies have publicly available ethics and anti-corruption programmes in place, […]

Holes In The Net: US Arms Export Control Gaps In Combatting Corruption

Corruption is widely recognized as one the major stumbling blocks in US government efforts to improve the capacity of foreign defense forces to address shared international security threats over the past 15 years. This report assesses the current state of US arms export controls to identify and curb corruption in US arms sales. It first […]

A Mutual Extortion Racket: The Military Industrial Complex and US Foreign Policy – The Cases of Saudi Arabia & UAE

Defence industry players, elected officials, the defence bureaucracy, and governments in the Middle East are intertwined and serve one another’s interest, often at the expense of US foreign policy outcomes. These mutually-beneficial relationships have contributed to a vicious cycle of conflict and human rights abuses across the Middle East and North Africa, including increased exports […]

Out of the Shadows: Promoting Openness and Accountability in the Global Defence Industry

The global defence sector is both enormous and highly vulnerable to corruption. Over the last decade, both exporting governments and industry players have taken important steps to prevent corruption, but despite the many advances in law and compliance, corruption in the international arms trade persists. More needs to be done to tackle this issue and […]

Licence to Bribe? Reducing corruption risks around the use of agents in defence procurement

Agents have played a key role in defence procurement for decades and many cases of procurement corruption have involved agents. They are widely recognised as one of the highest risk factors for corruption across the sector but, despite recent changes to the regulatory environment, the risks are as difficult to manage as ever.

Defence Companies Anti-Corruption Index 2015

The Defence Companies Anti-Corruption Index 2015 measures the transparency and quality of ethics and anti-corruption programmes of 163 defence companies from 47 countries.

Suspension & Debarment: Strengthening integrity in international defence contracting

How can governments protect themselves from corruption in the contracting process, without becoming overburdened by long and detailed legal processes? This report offers a new option: suspension and debarment systems. Suspension and debarment systems protect governments from engaging doing business with contractors who pose a business risk by preventing them from participating in government contracts […]

Single Sourcing: A multi-country analysis of non-competitive defence procurement

Full and open competition is one tool for governments to help ensure best value for money. Yet previous studies highlight that the defence sector is poor in this respect. This report explores trends in the award of non-competitive or single-source contracts in defence.

The extent of single sourcing in defence procurement and its relevance as a corruption risk: A first look

Single-source, or non-competitive, defence procurement is a widespread phenomenon that is prevalent both in devel- oping countries and in advanced arms exporting countries. The usual competitive bidding process – which assists in both value-for-money evaluation and in lowering corruption risk – is used much less often than expected in defence procurement. Whilst there can be […]

Chapter: Defence procurement – understanding, identifying and addressing corruption risks

Corruption within defence procurement can have a detrimental impact on security, operational effectiveness, and public trust. Despite defence procurement being a key area of focus in anti-corruption measures in many countries, there remains a serious lack of transparency. In this article for Getting the Deal Through – Public Procurement 2014, Tehmina Abbas summarises Transparency International’s […]

Due diligence and corruption risk in defence industry offsets programmes

The purpose of this report is to shed light on the quality of due diligence in defence offset programmes, and to identify areas of good practice and areas for improvement. It consists of an analysis of one-to-one interviews between the organisations’ person responsible for, or heavily engaged in, offsets, and the TI team. The interviews […]

Defence offsets: Addressing the risks of corruption & raising transparency

This report addresses one particular area of concern in the defence sector: offsets. Defence offsets are arrangements in which the purchasing government of the importing country obliges the supplying company of the exporting country to reinvest some proportion of the contract in the importing country. Offsets are big business, and yet they are very opaque […]