Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Ragi. Today we're discussing

corruption in the telecom industry with two guests, both of whom wrote or co-authored chapters

for Trace's latest book, Corrosive, Corruption, and Its Consequences. My first guest is Alexander Cooley.

Alex is the Claire Tau Professor of Political Science at Barnard College and director of Columbia's

Harriman Institute in New York. Alex, thank you for joining me. My pleasure to be with you.

You have done a lot of research on the risk in the telecom communication.

Generally, your chapter for us is called When Local Corruption Goes Global, the Internationalization

of Uzbekistan's Telecommunications Bribery Scandals. Why don't you just take us through

that chapter and your research? What's fascinating about Uzbekistan is a place is lies in the heart of Central Asia,

and for the longest time, really until a few years ago, was considered to be one of the

closest countries in the world, atarctic, repressive. You had both absolute control by its president, Islam Karimov,

of politics, of the information space, and also the economic space. It was also very autarkic.

Currency controls, capital controls, and so forth. And all of these trends get exacerbated by the events of 9-11 when it becomes a critical

partner for the United States and West in the war on terror.

The U.S. sets up military basing agreements there and access agreements.

And Kareemov ramps up his control of the state, but for political

and security reasons, the West is torn with order to criticize him. I mentioned all this in

terms of background, because it's critical, I think, for understanding how this scandal involving

three telecommunications companies, Telia or Talia Senara,

a Swedish Finnish company, MTS, Russian-based company, and Vimplcom, Dutch-based company,

all came to violate certain provisions of the FCPA and money laundering statutes.

And it's, I think, absolutely critical to sort of put yourself in the shoes of these companies

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