A Nigerian, Hamza Lawal, has sat as a member of the panel of judges as the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project on Thursday announced its Most Corrupt Person for the Year 2022.
The winner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, according to the OCCRP, is the “Person of the Year in organised crime and corruption.
Detailing Prigozhin’s involvements in organised crimes and corruption, OCCRP wrote on Thursday, Prigozhin “has earned this distinction for his tireless efforts to “extend Russia’s vicious and corrupt reach, to steal for Vladimir Putin, and to punish those who resist.”
It reported that Neither the jail term Prigozhin served for robbery as a young man nor his success in the newly capitalistic Russia of the 1990s were especially unusual for businessmen in those years. Even as he grew his restaurant and catering business on the back of favorable state contracts, earning millions of dollars and the nickname “Putin’s chef,” he was only following a trajectory taken by many other oligarchs.
It went ahead to say that “Prigozhin’s reputation began to take a more sinister turn in the mid-2010s as his schemes acquired a geopolitical dimension. His so-called “Internet Research Agency,” which employed low-rent trolls to spread disinformation and propaganda, became infamous for its attempts to interfere in U.S. politics.
“The effectiveness of its efforts, for which Prigozhin was indicted by a U.S. grand jury, may be open to question. But they heralded the beginnings of a transformation: Prigozhin was no longer just a man who had grown wealthy under the Putin regime. He had become one of its instruments. And before long, his army consisted of more than just trolls.
“The Wagner Group, nominally a “private military company” but in reality a paramilitary organization backed by the Russian armed forces, arose in the wake of Russia’s initial attack on Ukraine in 2014. Its fighters took part in the illegal occupation of Crimea and in the much bloodier battles in the country’s east.
Prigozhin’s precise connection to the group’s beginnings is murky. In one version,he was recruitedinto the role of Wagner’s patron and financier by military commanders who compensated him with lucrative defense contracts. In another,advanced by Prigozhin himselfafter years of denying any connection to Wagner, he was its original founder.
“What’s certain is that, in the ensuing years, Wagner fighters became notorious for the trail of blood they left in conflict zones across the world. In their brutal defense of the Assad regime in Syria, Prigozhin’s mercenaries cemented their reputation as Putin’s dark enforcers, carrying out missions the Russian army will not conduct openly — or cannot do at all.
“Prigozhin is a soldier of corruption,” says OCCRP’s Sullivan. “He fights and murders to install corruption. Wagner is nothing more than an organized crime group sanctioned by the Russian government.”
Lawal is the Chief Executive Officer of the Connected Development, a data-driven organisation concerned with development.
Apart from Lawal, others on the panel of judges include Maria Theresa Ronderos, Francois Valerian, Louise Shelley, Paul Radu and Drew Sullivan.