Anticorrp

The ANTICORRP Project WP10 on “Monitoring anti-corruption legislation and enforcement in Europe” has the overall aim to study state compliance and implementation of international and European anti-corruption norms in the EU member states. It is specifically interested in exploring whether international and European norms have an independent influence in prompting EU member states to adopt and implement effective anti-corruption laws, policies and practices domestically. While their research design and methodology are different, the three studies that are contained in this deliverable explore this broader issue by focusing on three areas of law and policy: (a) political financing, (b) public procurement, and (c) the confiscation and recovery of proceeds of corruption. The three studies presented here are based on primary empirical research and extensive data collection across all the EU-28.

The first study on “Domestic compliance with European norms of political financing across the EU Member States” by Dia Anagnostou and Evangelia Psychogiopoulou (ELIAMEP) explores state compliance with and implementation of the Council of Europe (CoE) rules and standards in the area of political financing, as these are applied in the Group of States against Corruption monitoring.

High-level corruption in public procurement thrives on intransparent, restricted and unfair competition. As the European Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union are vested with extensive powers to enforce transparent, open and fair competition in public procurement across the EU, they can be viewed as anticorruption actors. The second study on “Implementing the EU Public Procurement Directives: Effectiveness of the European Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union as anticorruption actors” by Mihály Fazekas (University of Cambridge, BCE) and Alejandro Ferrando Gamir (BCE) investigates the impact of all relevant European Commission reasoned opinions and Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) judgements on corruption risks in public procurement markets. By using a unique micro-level public procurement database consisting of over 2.8 million awarded contracts in 2009-2014 and a novel ‘objective’ indicator of corruption risk, the study identifies and compares the corruption risks before and after the implementation date of the CJEU opinions or judgements.

The third study entitled “A preparatory study on confiscation and recovery of criminal assets in the EU Member States” by Eva Nanopoulos (King’s College, Cambridge University) and Salvatore Sberna (European University Institute) provides an empirically grounded overview of the legal frame of each EU member state concerning their confiscation regimes (conviction based/non-conviction based/ extended confiscation) and their framework for the mutual recognition of freezing and confiscation orders. In coding and assessing the respective legal frame across all EU member states, this study makes use of an extended version of the “working law template” from the RAND report (2012). This template  collects information about the legal framework in each country regulating precautionary freezing, freezing and conviction-based confiscation orders, other regimes of confiscation (such as extended and non-conviction based confiscation), third parties confiscation, the procedures of management, realisation and disposal of frozen/confiscated assets, the mutual recognition of freezing and confiscation orders. In addition to the RAND mapping, the new templates, which our study has deployed, have also included any aspect of the new Directive 2014/42/EU that was not covered in the original template, as well as norms and provisions contained in the Council Framework Decision 2007/845/JHA on Asset Recovery Offices. As an annex to this study, three tables are provided to summarise the legal positions of each EU MS concerning their confiscation regimes (conviction based/non-conviction based/ extended confiscation) and their framework for the mutual recognition of freezing and confiscation orders.