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At the end of November we encouraged our readers to vote for their most corrupt person of the year on the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s (OCCRP) Person of the Year poll for 2024.
Every year since 2012, the OCCRP has singled out “those who do the most to wreak havoc around the world through organised crime and corruption”. Not to honour them in the way you would think, the OCCRP emphasises, but to “promote accountability by shining a light on those who have done the most to bolster corruption and the political collusion that often accompanies it”.
Former distinguished laureates include Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, Yevgeny Prigozhin, perennial favourite Vladimir Putin, and even the Danske Bank. Familiar names, especially for those who follow the ever more outrageous machinations of the corrupt.
Voting closed on 5 December 2024 and the winner has been announced.
It is none other than the ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad who, said the OCCRP, “led his country’s production and distribution of the highly addictive street drug Captagon, earning billions of dollars to operate prisons and maintain his brutal authoritarian rule”.
Sorry, South Africa – maybe next time.
But who can argue with Assad’s accomplishments? He came to power with smooth promises of a more liberal political environment, though quickly dashed voters’ hopes by reverting to authoritarianism and corruption. His actions led to the outbreak of a civil war that has been going on for 13 years, his war crimes are numerous, and he instituted “centralised control, suppression of dissent, and a reliance on a powerful security apparatus”. What a guy.
As prisons get emptied and mass graves are dug up, said the OCCRP, the scale of Assad’s brutality toward his own people is becoming ever clearer. “The political, economic, and social damage caused by Assad, both in Syria and in the region, will take decades to overcome,” commented 2024 judge Alia Ibrahim, the co-founder of Arabic-language independent journalism platform Daraj.com.
This year’s contest produced a surprise in the form of a special tribute to Equatorial Guinea’s president Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, one of the world’s longest serving dictators. He scooped the inaugural Lifetime Non-Achievement Award. Congratulations!
Obiang seized power from his uncle in a masterfully-staged coup in 1979, and since then has “mercilessly repressed any dissent with unlawful arrests, forced disappearances, and torture”. Truly a deserving winner.
“Both Assad and Obiang are examples of long-time dictatorial regimes, in which corruption plays a critical role,” said the OCCRP.
