The Pandora Papers Opens up Pandora’s Box: Integrity in Crisis

Abstract

Integrity lies at the center of state-society interactions, with broad implications for the practice of public administration, governance, and public service delivery. The Pandora Papers leaks are hard examples of integrity violations, shining a light on how public administration operates in practice. The integrity deficits revealed not only threaten people’s wellbeing, but also put on display the state’s leniency toward rich and powerful people accumulating wealth through corruption, fraud, and tax evasion, among other crimes. In this context, this article attempts to understand whether the Pandora Papers leaks violate of the fundamentals of integrity. Drawing on cases and examples, the findings of the article show that the Pandora Papers illustrate the integrity deficit of statesmen, political leaders, businesspersons, and bureaucrats, the people responsible for ensuring integrity in managing the state and statecraft. The article further elucidates that bad governance affects integrity, both nationally and globally.

Keywords:

• Pandora Papers
• integrity
• transparency
• corruption
• global governance

Notes

1 Some of the high-profile world leaders from the developed countries included in the Pandora Papers are the Queen of the Great Britain, former Chancellor of Austria, the UK’s former Treasury Commercial Secretary, three former premiers of Canada, former premier of Japan, and the US former Secretary of State.

2 An opposite view of this is that a person of real integrity acts with integrity even in an environment that does not favor or support it. A person who lacks integrity may well do non-beneficial things even in an environment where integrity is expected, favored, and rewarded.

3 A study by Wathne and Stephenson (2021) disclosed that the cost-of-corruption estimates are unfounded. For details, visit https://www.u4.no/publications/the-credibility-of-corruption-statistics.pdf.

4 This point may be interpreted from different perspectives; the corrupt political leadership may (i) fear losing the support of elites who benefit from these corrupt transactions, (ii) fear that they could be punished by future antagonistic governments, and (iii) fear loss of financial and other benefits to themselves.