Digital Crusaders: Technology offers weapons for the battle against corruption by Chris Wellisz published by IMF (3/2018).
“Oleksii Sobolev was a fund manager by day and a pro-democracy protester by night. After work, he would leave his office at Dragon Asset Management in Kiev to join the crowds camped out in Independence Square demanding the resignation of a president they viewed as corrupt. Sobolev handed out food and helped clean up the square. When police started firing at the so-called Maidan protesters, he brought tires that were burned to create a protective curtain of smoke.
“The saying was, ‘Fires save lives,’” Sobolev recalls.
Ukraine’s president ended up in exile, and Sobolev gave up managing money to take an unpaid advisory post helping to restructure state-owned enterprises. Four years later, he has put his business skills to work fighting corruption, a problem that continues to bedevil the eastern European country of 44 million people. Ukraine ranked 131st among 176 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2016.
Sobolev’s team of activists created an electronic auction system that brought transparency to notoriously murky sales of public assets ranging from bank loans to scrap metal. In its first 13 months, the system, ProZorro.Sale, handled $210 million, almost as much as the money raised from conventional privatization sales in the past five years, says Max Nefyodov, Ukraine’s first deputy economy minister. That’s a significant boost for the cash-strapped Ukrainian government.
Sobolev belongs to a new breed of idealistic young people who are using digital technologies to promote transparency and integrity. Just as smartphones and social media helped empower popular uprisings from Ukraine to Tunisia,
21st century technologies such as blockchain and big data offer powerful new weapons against corruption, a phenomenon that dates back at least as far as the first century BC, when Julius Caesar secured the office of Pontifex Maximus by greasing voters’ palms…”
