Corruption Archive

At the beginning of 2020, Belize’s ruling center-right United Democratic Party was well-positioned for the general election in November. The economy, while not spectacular, was growing at a stable rate. Inflation was low, and the country’s external debt situation was under control. Prime Minister Dean Barrow had led the UDP to an unprecedented three consecutive election victories since 2008, and was generally popular among Belizeans. Barrow is term-limited by the constitution, but his favored candidate to succeed him, National Security Minister John Saldivar, was elected as leader of the UDP at a party convention in February. With 19 of the […]

PRAGUE—Last month, a Slovakian tycoon accused of masterminding the assassination of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak in 2018—a murder that profoundly transformed Slovakian politics—was acquitted by a special criminal court in Bratislava, the capital. The surprising verdict in what Michal Vasecka, a sociologist at the Bratislava Policy Institute, calls “the most followed trial in the history of Slovakia,” has been met with “anger and disbelief,” he says. Many Slovaks see the acquittal of Marian Kocner as a major setback in the government’s campaign to rid the small Central European nation of its endemic corruption. “It seems that the apparent plotters of […]

The recent bombshell report from The New York Times—which obtained more than two decades’ worth of President Donald Trump’s tax returns, including from the first two years of his presidency—offered a number of remarkable details, from how little Trump has paid in income taxes to the staggering $421 million in debt that he has personally guaranteed. Yet perhaps the most concerning revelations from the Times’ report centered on a topic long central to Trump’s rise, and to his presidency: foreign money. The tax returns didn’t reveal any new information about potential financing from Russia, a question that has long stalked […]