Criminals Showed ELI How Much They Rely on Corruption

By: Nicole Byrd, Strategic Intelligence and Publication Manager, Earth League International (ELI).

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In March, Earth League International (ELI) published Money Talks: What Criminals Told Us About Corruption. This report on how corruption facilitates environmental and wildlife crime collates and synthesizes over a decade of information obtained firsthand by ELI’s undercover field investigators from criminal networks. Thanks to dozens of examples, we were able to clearly demonstrate some key takeaways and assert that without fighting corruption, there is no way to effectively combat organized crime.

Highlighted Key Takeaways:

Corrupt enablers, both public and private sector, are an essential business need for TCOs. At every stage of illicit supply chains, corruption was what made crime possible. Criminals rely on bribes to source, move, hide, and launder illegal wildlife, timber, gold, often overlapping with other illegal commodities via financial flows and transport logistics.
One bad apple can, in fact, ruin the barrel. A single leak by an official on the take can waste months of investigations, prosecutorial efforts, manpower hours, and budgets. In our most shocking example, a single law enforcement leak about anti-wildlife trafficking operations was shared with almost 400 Chinese wildlife traffickers in Bolivia, in a single group message. All were sternly warned to hide endangered species, wildlife products and photos of both. (pp 35-6)
Bribe amounts are highly responsive to market forces. These forces include perceived risk, commodity price and scarcity, legal penalties and enforcement, and the position of the bribe recipient. After the Bolivia operations, a source told us that bribes to law enforcement officers for their complicity in wildlife trafficking had jumped from $200 to $1000, completely unaware that it was ELI’s information that had led to the arrests of the country’s top five jaguar traffickers.
Chinese officials abroad help drive and facilitate the illegal wildlife trade. Intelligence collected by ELI in multiple countries showed IWT involvement by diplomats, leaders of cultural and business associations, and employees of state-owned companies. In multiple countries, diplomats acted as a bridge between wildlife traffickers and officials back home. One wildlife trader in South America described how embassy officials recruited him into the trade, and that they told him which “gifts” were preferred by officials in mainland China in lieu of cash that was more likely to be detected by the CCP. The same source talked about members of the diplomatic community hand-carrying items home, such as tiger bone wine.
Solutions will require a broad range of stakeholders that can address specific parts of illicit supply chains. Given weak rule of law in much of the world, endemic corruption, and increasing geocriminality and state capture, we can’t afford to focus too narrowly on law enforcement. We must find ways to activate and incentivize a broad range of stakeholders across sectors, with clear asks and justifications that speak to their own priorities and motivations. Simply sharing information is insufficient. If we can persuade key actors across the financial, tech, and logistics sectors to fight TOC alongside the public sector and civil society, we can find ways to disrupt every node of illicit supply chains, and we can start to deploy these in tandem. TCOs are powerful, but they don’t hold all the cards. We can effectively fight back with smart strategies, clear goals, tailored asks and good incentives.