Corruption risks in Australia
Although its index ranking dropped eight points over the last six years, Australia remained the thirteenth least corrupt country in the world on the Transparency International 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index, a position it has held since 2015. While this ranking gives the impression that Australia is a comparatively low-risk environment, there has been a recent focus on anti-bribery and anti-corruption in Australia.
- In March 2018, the Australian Senate Economic References Committee released its report into the effectiveness of Australia’s foreign bribery laws (the Senate Report), which included recommendations for improvements to the laws. The proposed broadening of anti-bribery and anti-corruption investigations to include foreign bribery as a predicate offence for serious money laundering offences, would enable government authorities to use more intrusive and covert investigative powers than would otherwise be lawfully permitted.
- The Australian Parliament passed new false accounting offence provisions in the Criminal Code, criminalising intentional and reckless conduct when dealing with accounting documents.
- The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) criminally prosecuted the Reserve Bank of Australia’s subsidiary companies, Securency International Pty Ltd and Note Printing Australia Pty Ltd. In May 2018, a former senior employee of Securency, Clifford Gerathy, plead guilty to a false accounting offence.
- In July 2017, former directors of Lifese Engineering Pty Ltd plead guilty to charges of conspiring to bribe a foreign public official, which resulted in each director being sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and a A$250,000 fine.
- Under a Ministerial Direction, the investigation of foreign bribery has become one of the AFP’s strategic priorities.
- The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has established a Fraud and Anti-Corruption Centre within its multi-agency Serious Financial Crime Taskforce (SFCT). The AFP has 19 ongoing investigations into foreign bribery and corruption offences, including publically known investigations into Leighton Holdings (now known as CIMIC Group Limited), OZ Minerals Ltd, Tabcorp Holdings Limited, SMEC Holdings Limited, Iluka Resources, Rio Tinto, Getax Australia Pty Ltd and Sundance Resources Limited.
- In May 2018, the Northern Territory Commissioner of Police was convicted of perverting the course of justice, in a case arising out of an AFP investigation.
Australia is a party to the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention), which provides the international framework for laws dealing with transnational bribery. As such, Australia is subject to ongoing progress reports, and the OECD is still pressing for Australia to work harder in the area of enforcing foreign bribery and corruption laws. As a consequence of the matters listed above, local and international stakeholders – including the legislature, non-government organisations and the media – are paying closer attention to Australia’s level of commitment to the war on bribery and corruption.