BUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS / Šturma, Mozetic (eds)

national and international networks of cooperation, being present in many fronts of combat (Executive Branch, Legislative Branch, Judiciary, Market), which is why it has proved to be one of the most difficult illicit acts to establish and hold accountable with total success. Thus, inaccuracies about what constitutes and exhaustively characterize corruptive acts arise in part from the rhetorical potential that the expression presents in its history of political, philosophical and legal treatment. Politicians of all segments and parties, over time, have invoked the specter of corruption to denigrate opponents, bringing to the collation subliminal motives for decisions which they sometimes oppose, only to promote / facilitate their personal political interests. 25 It is obvious that we also have in these scenarios arguments in the sense that corruption is sometimes used to achieve consensuses or adhesions to projects that, after all, will benefit important public interests, as if this were possible considering the form illicit and the direct and indirect damages that this action can cause not only to social demands, but to Democracy itself and its institutions. What is important is that the definition of what is corruption remains an unfinished project, the one because material and formally the creativity to expand the tentacles of corruption seems to be endless; to two, because public pressure fueled by institutional and social control systems, coupled with the role of the media, has shown that the mission to combat corruption is permanent. It is interesting how Miguel Schloss, Executive Director of Transparency International, presents various forms of corruption beyond those traditionally seen by criminal laws, namely: In this regard, it should be understood that bribery encompasses payoffs for a wide variety of illicit activities: (i) getting around licenses, permits, and signatures; (ii) acquiring monopolistic power through entry barriers to competitors; (iii) access to public goods, including legal or uneconomic awards of public procurement contracts; (iv) access to the use of public physical assets or their outright stripping and appropriation; (v) access to preferential financial assets, such as credit; (vi) illegal trade in goods banned for security and health considerations, such as drugs and nuclear materials; (vii) illicit financial transactions, such as money laundering and insider trading; (viii) influencing administrative or legislative actions; and (ix) influencing judicial decisions. In all these cases, corruption occurs when economic opportunities for it prevail and political will to combat it is lacking. In a way, corruption is a symptom of fundamental economic and 25 It is curious that in US political history the impasse after the 1824 presidential election was solved by what opponents called a corrupt bargain , which resulted in the election of President John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackso, the winner by vote popular, a situation that occurred due to the particularities of the system of suffrage for the President of the Republic in this country. See the text of CHOI, Eunjung; WOO, Jongseok. Political Corruption, Economic Performance, and Electoral Outcomes: A Cross- National Analysis. In Contemporary Politics Review 16 (3): 249-262, 2010, accessed by the site: http:// www.tandfonline.com/toc/ccpo20/current, 03/20/2017. See also the text by KRUMAN, M.W.: The Second American Party System and the Transformation of Revolutionary Republicanism. In Journal of the Early Republic. Vol. 12, No. 4 (Winter, 1992), p. 509-537, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, accessed through the site: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3123876?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.

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