Two crypto-billionaires pour millions into a political party and its wannabe prime minister in return for legislation that favours their businesses. A drug trafficker’s bribe to a senior official buys a cocaine shipment safe passage across a border. Human traffickers installing loyalists in the agencies mandated to stop them. A foreign power uses evidence of a president’s sexual abuse of children to dictate government policy. An influential lobby group donates to both a ruling party and opposition members to hedge their bets on influence. All are routes to state capture.
The Dictionary of Corruption defines state capture as systematic corruption whereby narrow interest groups take control of the institutions and processes through which public policy is made, directing it away from the common good and towards their own interests.
