Alex Haines instructed by Respondent in case brought by the Integrity Vice Presidency (INT) of the World Bank Group (WBG)

Alex Haines, a member of OTC’s Business Crime and Regulation team, has been instructed to represent a Respondent accused by INT of fraud following a successful bid on a project in East Africa.

Alex is one of the leading practitioners in the UK and EU in the sanctions and debarment frameworks of Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs):

• he sits as a Sanctions Officer at the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB);
• he has represented companies and individuals before both the World Bank’s Sanctions Board in Washington DC and the Asian Development Bank’s Integrity Oversight Committee in Manila;
• he has been instructed in cases of corruption brought by the investigative and integrity offices of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) and European Investment Bank (EIB);
• he has experience of negotiated resolution agreements, voluntary disclosure, and the redesign of integrity compliance programmes to make them compliant with IFIs’ Anti-Corruption Task Force guidelines;
• he authored the chapter on MDBs and their debarment systems in one of the leading practitioners’ texts on corruption – Lissack and Horlick on Bribery and Corruption (3rd ed., Lexis Nexis);
• he has lectured on the sanctions and debarment frameworks of MDBs to the Brazilian Bar Association, British Chamber of Commerce, Korean Bar Association, Shanghai Bar Association, English Law Week in Mexico, and was a panellist at the 35^th International Symposium on Economic Crime at Jesus College, Cambridge; and
• his work on debarment and MDBs has continued through his efforts with Transparency International’s Suspension and Debarment Taskforce and his published headnotes as rapporteur for Oxford International Organizations (Oxford University Press).

MDBs such as the WBG have created their own administrative processes in order to protect the integrity of their operations. INT is an independent unit within the WBG that investigates and pursues sanctions related to allegations of fraud and corruption in WBG-financed projects. The WBG sanctions system is a formal two-tiered administrative process designed to protect the integrity of WBG operations and ensure that development financing is used only for its intended purposes. At the first tier, cases are typically filed with the World Bank’s Suspension and Debarment Officer (SDO), who reviews accusations brought by INT that a firm or individual has engaged in sanctionable misconduct and determines whether the evidence is sufficient to initiate sanctions proceedings. The second tier is the WBG Sanctions Board, an independent administrative tribunal composed of seven external judges, that serves as the final decision-maker in all contested cases of sanctionable misconduct in development projects financed by the WBG.

Sanctions are intended to both prevent future misconduct and encourage rehabilitation of the sanctioned parties. There are five types of sanctions at the WBG: fixed-term debarment, debarment with conditional release, conditional non-debarment, letter of reprimand, and restitution. The most common sanction is debarment with conditional release, which excludes the sanctioned party from access to WBG financing for a minimum period of time, and the sanctioned party is released only after satisfying certain conditions, like implementing a compliance program. Debarments exceeding one year extend across several other MDBs, namely AsDB, AfDB Group, EBRD, and IADB Group, pursuant to a cross-debarment agreement. 

Find out more

Alex Haines is called to both the English and Irish Bars and is a US-qualified attorney admitted to the NY Bar. He is a dual national, fluent in French and Spanish, specialist in international law and sanctions with rare expertise in international organisations law. He was appointed to the Attorney General’s London B Panel in 2019 and as Sanctions Officer at the Caribbean Development Bank in 2020. The cases he has been instructed in have involved more than 35 International Organisations including the EIB, World Bank Group, IMF, NATO and UN (including its specialised agencies and funds). He is ranked in Chambers and Partners for Sanctions and Legal 500 for Business and Regulatory Crime (including global investigations).

You can find out more about Alex’s International Organisations and MDB practice on our expertise page or contact Sam Carter on +44 (0)203 989 6669 or Colin Bunyan on +44 (0)20 7427 4886 for a confidential discussion.

News 19 Jun, 2023