| Hi there, This is our last newsletter for 2017, so this week we’re taking a look back at some of the biggest corruption stories from the past 12 months. Back in January, Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction giant implicated in the massive Lava Jato scandal, was preparing to pay billions of dollars' worth of settlements over bribes paid to secure public contracts. Not much later, South Korean President Park Geun-hye was ousted from office after having been impeached for corruption last December. Then in Spain we saw the arrest of the former regional president of Madrid over an alleged kick-backs-for-contracts scheme. And in June, a huge leak of emails appeared to show how the Gupta family wielded influence over South Africa’s President Zuma. Soon after, former President Lula of Brazil was convicted of corruption and money-laundering charges. Then the Azerbaijani Laundromat investigation exposed how the resource-rich Caucasus nation bought influence in Europe through a $2.9billion slush fund. Anti-corruption efforts received a major boost in October when Teodorin Obiang was convicted by a French court for laundering vast sums embezzled from Equatorial Guinea, of which he is vice president (his father being the president). In early November, the Paradise Papers shone a light on how the rich and powerful (including royalty and household-name celebrities) avoid tax through a secret offshore economy, using similar schemes to the ones criminals and the corrupt use to launder their dirty money. Now, as the year ends, news has come in that the President of Peru has narrowly avoided impeachment for his ties to Odebrecht. We’ve also heard this week that the U.S. Government has imposed sanctions on individuals and companies long suspected of corruption, among them the former President of Gambia, the daughter of Uzbekistan’s former dictator and a mining magnate implicated in shady dealings in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 2017 might have felt like a long year, and some of these cases show that the wheels of justice turn slowly. Transparency International is in it for the long run, and we thank you for your continued support. Wherever you are in the world, we wish you a peaceful end to 2017 and a fair and prosperous 2018. | 