On July 28, FIFA confirmed a plan to create a new commercial subsidiary, FIFA Forward Enterprise, that would sell a stake of up to 20 percent in the commercial rights to the World Cup and other FIFA competitions to outside investors. The deal is being pitched at an initial equity valuation of $20 billion, with FIFA aiming to raise up to $4.2 billion this year.

On 17 June, after a five-month trial, a London jury acquitted Diezani Alison-Madueke of all six bribery charges, closing an investigation that had run for more than a decade.

A compliance officer's job is never done. Changes in political regimes, amendments to regulations, rules, and legislation regarding compliance and governance, new technologies, and geopolitical events create a maelstrom of moving targets for a compliance team to simplify and understand and then convey to colleagues how these will affect their day-to-day interactions.

FIFA has spent years telling anyone who would listen that it changed its ways in regard to its corruption issues. Among their efforts include a new disciplinary code, “independent” judicial bodies, a governance overhaul built to bury the memory of the bribery scandals that put more than a dozen officials in the reach of U.S. prosecutors in 2015. Then, on a Sunday in July, a phone call from the President of the United States undid a good part of that work in a single news cycl

In a previous post for BriberyMatters, I covered the so-called Flamingo Revolution protests, which erupted in Albania against the construction of two resorts, one on a stretch of formerly-protected coastline and the other on a nearby island that was formerly a military site. For this second part of the series, to better understand the underlying dynamics of the situation, I spoke with Esmeralda Ballesha, an Albanian consultant with deep experience in governance, business deve

While the promise of dramatic reforms following Hungary’s April elections has captured headlines, that same month saw another major anti-corruption development in Europe. On April 22, a Moldovan court sentenced former politician, oligarch and power broker Vladimir Plahotniuc to 19 years in prison for his role in the 2014 theft of $1 billion from three Moldovan banks, which had also implicated a number of other business and political leaders.