Corruption

Jeroen Michels: Does corruption at customs still scare you? Well, it should

You might not immediately spot the link between the deadly Tianjin explosion in China, the million-dollar La Linea scandal in Guatemala, and the investigations against the giant American company Walmart, all in 2015. The link? Corruption in customs.

In Guatemala, the so-called La Linea scandal led to the resignation of more than 40 public officials and, most notably, to the resignation and imprisonment of the Guatemalan president Otto Molina Pérez. It was a straightforward scheme: importers would bribe customs officials to create fake documents granting importers a steep discount on the import duties for their goods. Allegedly, millions of dollars of customs revenue were siphoned away from the state into the private bank accounts of corrupt importers and custom officials.