Monday, April 12, 2010
Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) Collaborate to Fight Corruption
Last week, the
leading Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) signed an Agreement
for Mutual Enforcement of Debarment Decisions designed to fight fraud and
corruption. The MDBs signing the new
agreement include the African Development Bank Group, the Asian Development
Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Inter-American
Development Bank Group and the World Bank Group.
Under the new
agreement, when any one of the signatories publically debars an entity for more
than one year, all the other signatories
will do the same. For instance, if a
contractor fraudulently diverts money from a World Bank project resulting in
debarment, all of the other signatories will blacklist that contractor from
bidding on future projects funded by them for a period of time. In addition to abiding by the agreement, all
of the signatories will continue to manage their own independent strategies to
prevent fraud and corruption.
This agreement is a
validation of the MDBs’ commitment to a 2006
agreement as part of the International Financial Institutions
Anti-Corruption Task Force. The parties
to the 2006 agreement promised to harmonize their definitions of practices that
are subject to sanctions and to share information to combat fraud and
corruption.
The World Bank
reported this cross-debarment agreement in a Press
Release and a News
Article.
SS
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/nonprofit/2010/04/multilateral-development-banks-mdbs-collaborate-to-fight-corruption--1.html