The oil industry has long been an attractive target for corruption and corrupt actors. State owned oil companies have frequently been accused of being a conduit for syphoning off public funds into private bank accounts, despite repeated civil society efforts to fight these networks of corruption in countries like Brazil and Nigeria. Guest host Deborah Gordon is joined by Carnegie Senior Fellow Sarah Chayes, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and author Steve Coll, and Nigerian anticorruption activist Olarenwaju Suraju to discuss how corruption can become an inextricable part of an economy and how civil society and the U.S. government can work to prevent it.
Steve Coll is dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism and a staff writer at the New Yorker. He is the author of a bestselling profile of ExxonMobil called Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power.
Olarenwaju Suraju is a Nigerian anticorruption and environmental activist, chair of that country’s Civil Society Network Against Corruption, and of the Human and Environmental Development Agenda.
Sarah Chayes is a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Democracy and Rule of Law Program, and co-author of “The Oil Curse: A Remedial Role for the Oil Industry.”
