Corruption: The search for the smoking gun

An internal report sent to the World Bank’s board of directors earlier this year was one of the first indications of a sea change. In it, the Bank’s operations evaluation department (OED) used the word “corruption” for the first time ever, citing two projects ­ the Sixth Highway Project in Haiti and the Natural Gas Technical Assistance Project in Nigeria. These projects, it explained in its April report, were “among many” which were “severely hampered by lack of transparency, spurious accounting practices, and non-compliance with Bank procurement rules”.