From Cross Debarment to Integrity Compliance: Promoting Corporate Governance in Development Across ASEAN

Abstract

It has been six years since the signing of the Agreement for Mutual Enforcement of Debarment Decisions by five Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs)¹ on April 9, 2010, whereby these five MDBs agreed to recognize each other’s debarment decisions based on a finding of one or more of the four uniform “sanctionable practices”.² For the 10 countries comprising the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN),³ there are 80 debarred companies and individuals listed on the World Bank’s Listing of Ineligible Firms & Individuals⁴ from ASEAN, and 85 companies and individuals appearing on the Anti-Corruption Sanctions List published by the ADB.⁵ More than one third (40 %) of the ADB ASEAN sanctions are cross debarments from the World Bank; while ADB cross debarments constitute one quarter (25 %) of the World Bank ASEAN debarments.

The author is the Lead Investigator at the World Bank Integrity Vice Presidency. The findings, interpretation and conclusions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Integrity Vice Presidency of the World Bank. The World Bank cannot guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this work.