Campion grant awarded to Dr Tomáš Diviák

Dr Tomáš Diviák from the Department of Criminology and the Mitchell Centre for Social Network Analysis received the Campion grant from the Manchester Statistical Society for a project called Conspiracy to Corrupt: Extraction and Analysis of Bribery Network Data from Deferred Prosecution Agreements.

Mapping bribery networks is crucial for understanding how corporate corruption unfolds and evolves over time. This makes empirical analysis of bribery networks informative for formulating and testing efficient evidence-based strategies in combatting corruption, which cannot be obtained by more traditional corruption indices or perception-based measures.

This project aims to collect network data derived from publicly available Statements of Facts (SoF) produced as part of Deferred Prosecution Agreements with corporations implicated in bribery. SoFs provide a detailed textual account of the criminal behaviours of the case, including the actors involved, their relations, and information as to when the criminal acts took place and how.

In order to construct networks from the unstandardized SoFs, a framework for extraction and coding of relational information for criminal networks will be used. In all the networks, the nodes represent actors participating in a given case, who are characterized by their affiliation to sectors and to organizations. Ties among the actors represent their communication (calls, e-mails, meetings) or transactions (payments).

Using social network analysis can be used to describe the structure and resilience of each network constructed from this data, its evolution over time, and identify key actors in each case.