Patrick Alley has spent over three decades tracing blood money, illegal logging, and corporate complicity. At this year’s Doxumentale, we sat down with the Global Witness co-founder to talk about how power protects itself, why truth alone isn’t enough — and what it takes to expose the machinery behind global corruption.
Patrick Alley is a co-founder of Global Witness, an organization that has been uncovering grand-scale corruption, illegal logging, and the global networks behind exploitation for over 30 years. In his recent book Terrible Humans, Alley tells gripping true stories of how power protects itself — and how uncovering the truth often comes at a cost.
Patrick Alley: I think the truth that still shocks me is that the money from corruption — the root of corruption — is very often in the rich world, where we have theoretically good legal systems, checks and balances, and yet some of the worst corruption is carried out by some of the world's most famous, most respectable companies — particularly in the oil industry.
We've exposed many powerful people — with mixed results. Yes, there are some who’ve had sanctions imposed against them, like Dan Gertler, an Israeli mining tycoon in the Congo. People have had property seized, people have been arrested and tried. We even managed to get UN Security Council sanctions on one country, Liberia, many years ago.
So you do see successes, but the powerful people that we tackle have powerful lawyers and powerful friends, and our hit rate is not nearly as much as it should be.
When we began in 1995, with our first investigations in Cambodia, we knew nothing about corruption — it wasn’t on our radar at all.
We came across a deal. We were investigating the timber trade between the Khmer Rouge and Thailand, and we were leaked some letters from the Cambodian Prime Ministers to the Thai Defence Minister, asking for permission to export a million cubic metres of rainforest timber into Thailand.
This was a deal that would have netted the Khmer Rouge $90 million and the Cambodian government $35 million — essentially two sides in a civil war collaborating to make money. That was deeply shocking. That was the first example of corruption I came across. And I quite quickly realised that it pervades almost everything we look at.
Very often, they come to us. In some areas of what we investigate, it’s very hard if you don’t have a whistleblower or someone leaking information. Companies or banks won’t tell you anything.
But also, just by carrying out investigations — when we go to a country and talk to as many people as we can, it can happen that someone wants to give information but didn’t know who to give it to. And they hear this is happening — then they become a whistleblower because they suddenly have a channel for their information.
Trying to uncover networks of anonymously owned companies or financial flows is incredibly difficult. Unlike law enforcement, we don’t have subpoena power.
We can only be lucky if someone leaks information to us. And even then, that might only be the beginning. For example, once we were leaked a bank document — a SWIFT document — that showed thousands of financial transactions. They told us, “There’s some corrupt ones in there,” but we didn’t know which.
So, sheer detective work: you go through it, easier now with data investigations — look for similarities, companies set up in the same place over the same time period, and then you might get patterns and dig in further. It’s just really hard detective work.
They deal with it in a few ways. One is to get more evasive, to hide things better. But very often, they feel emboldened — empowered — because they are so rich and powerful, and they don’t care.
They’ll use the courts to prevent legal action or even to turn legal action on its head. A very recent case — we weren’t involved — the Serious Fraud Office lost a big case against Eurasian Natural Resource Corporation and now has to pay hundreds of millions in damages.
So some of these big oligarchs can outspend even big government investigative agencies. That’s a real problem.
I’ve never had any kind of ethical issue with doing undercover investigations or using confidential sources — because what we were trying to do was uncover information for the public good.
The people we were looking at — they’re the ones without ethics, not us.
I think a bigger issue is ensuring the confidentiality and protection of those sources, and obviously using the information responsibly. Because some of it we know is relevant, and some of it maybe isn’t — and that we should be careful not to publish.
They have a lot of responsibility. I’ve seen this happen over time.
The World Bank, the UN — in the past they’ve been completely feeble on this issue because it’s too embarrassing. They don’t want to embarrass a head of state or senior politician. So they prefer to ignore it — which is the worst thing you can do.
One of our jobs is to make sure they can’t ignore it — to keep putting it in their face.
In terms of governments, it varies. Some are quite good. Some will only act if you really don’t give them a choice. But very often, it comes down not so much to governments, but to law enforcement — the people who prosecute. It’s not governments.
With the rise of digital technology, we need to be more careful. But it’s also given us far more possibilities to investigate.
We can now analyse things we simply couldn’t have before. If you need to look at three million documents to find a pattern — which we have done — using digital technology, that’s now doable. Before, it wasn’t.
We do have to be more careful about the way people look at us. But actually, we’re quite open. We’re a public organisation. We publish everything we know — so there’s not much for them to find out that they don’t already know.
I think it’s amazing to be here at this festival in Berlin — a wonderful collection of people interested in a whole load of things.
This exhibition, for example, by students from Serbia about the massive demonstrations going on there against the corrupt government — it’s giving more people a window into these issues.
The filmmakers, the films being made here, are incredibly important in raising awareness.
Because in the end, public awareness will be the most powerful thing. Public anger — if governments are democratic, they’re worried about votes. If it becomes a voting issue, then that’s important. If they’re autocratic, all you can do is assume they’re corrupt and expose the dodgy bank accounts.
