Uncovering the Transnational Networks, Organisational Techniques and State‐Corporate Ties Behind Grand Corruption: Building an Investigative Methodology

While grand corruption is a major global governance challenge, researchers notably lack a systematic methodology for conducting qualitative research into its complex forms. To address this lacuna, the following article sets out and applies the corruption investigative framework (CIF), a methodology designed to generate a systematic, transferable approach for grand corruption research. Its utility will be demonstrated employing a case study that centres on an Australian-led megaproject being built in Papua New Guinea’s capital city, Port Moresby. Unlike conventional analyses of corruption in Papua New Guinea, which emphasise its local characteristics and patrimonial qualities, application of CIF uncovered new empirical layers that centre on transnational state-corporate power, the ambiguity of civil society, and the structural inequalities that marginalise resistance movements. The important theoretical consequences of the findings and underpinning methodology are explored.


Introduction
As a specific modality of corruption, 1 grand corruption is commonly distinguished by three factors (Bloom 2014;Jain 2001). First, it involves significant economic value, either in monetary or asset form. Second, the corrupt activity is ordinarily not an isolated incident, but rather part of a systemic pattern of conduct. Finally, it is enacted/facilitated by senior officials capable of harnessing policy, laws and organisational machinery to prosecute the requisite transactions, creating enduring institutional cultures, repertoires and processes that are favourable to corrupt forms of activity.
Research into grand corruption is beset by a number of significant challenges that have been experienced more generally by scholars inquiring into the crimes of the powerful (see Tombs and Whyte 2003). Most fundamentally, our ability to analyse and theorise grand corruption in its particular spatio-temporal forms depends on systematic fieldwork that can document in rich detail the national and transnational networks, schemes, mechanisms and infrastructure essential to its organisation. Unlike some arenas of social inquiry, where the challenge is primarily one of selecting the right set of methods for exploring an environment that is either welcoming or indifferent to the researcher, grand corruption research faces an object which is actively hostile to approximation.
As a result, the increasingly large scholarly landscape dealing with corruption has tended to focus on more accessible areas of inquiry, including definitional debates, macro-measures of corruption levels, gauging its economic impacts, and frameworks for evaluating anti-corruption initiatives (Schoeneborn and Homberg 2016;Torsello and Vernard 2016). Less urgency has been given to the task of producing robust empirical data sets that document the precise motivations, institutional structures, actor networks, illicit repertoires and terrains of impunity that underpin grand corruption schemes.
Unless serious attention is paid to grand corruption at a molecular, qualitative level-focusing on how it is organised, executed and concealed-through the development of comparable, investigative data sets and applied theory, understanding how and where it exists risks becoming educated guess work. Against this backdrop, this article applies a series of methodological innovations-the corruption investigative framework (CIF)-developed by the author in a bid to construct a systematic and transferable approach for qualitative grand corruption research, which is capable of documenting its organisational spokes, institutional mechanisms and facilitating activities (see also Lasslett forthcoming).
CIF has been honed through fieldwork in diverse settings, including Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Uzbekistan. To exhibit its exploratory power, a case study will be presented that focuses on a public-private megaproject in Port Moresby which will transform a former PNG national park into a luxury estate. This site will evidently be used to co-host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, scheduled to take place in Port Moresby during November 2018, with support from both the PNG and Australian governments. Using CIF, data sets were produced which illuminate the key individual and organisational actors involved in this public-private initiative, including their professional biographies, ties with political power centres, core group adhesives, and the commercial repertoires employed to obtain and develop a prime Port Moresby location. Data analysis uncovered evidence of illegal transactions and conflicts of interest.
Critically, these results contain insights which adds a new dimension to existing scholarly and policy tracts on grand corruption in PNG. Informed predominantly by neo-patrimonial frameworks, the literature has focused on clientalistic models of distributive politics that have emerged within an ethnically fractured population, and a parliamentary system lacking coherent party politics. For example, the World Bank observes: 'a particular characteristic of the traditional culture of PNG … is a system of relationships/obligations between individuals connected by IJCJ&SD 31 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2017 6(4) common origin, hailing from common geographic area, sharing common kinship and common language … [which] can provide a strong incentive for nepotistic and corrupt practices ' (2011: 17).
Against this backdrop, the data presented here reveals transnational state-corporate activity that centres on complex forms of market and regulatory manipulation, designed to extract superprofits through targeting vulnerable revenue streams and assets. The latter activity was spearheaded by a developer coalition led by Australian-based executives espousing strong corporate social responsibility credentials, backed by key sections of the human rights community. This particular international dimension is perhaps not surprising: Australian corporate interests have dominated PNG's national economy over the past forty years since independence in 1975, drawing on the cultural capital and influence Australia enjoys as the former colonial authority. This dominance is justified by citing the beneficial role Australian investment plays in bringing 'development' to PNG and promoting good governance, a contention that is yet to be comprehensively scrutinised.
On that note, an introduction to CIF will now be provided, before I then turn to the case study and its theoretical implications.

The corruption investigative framework
CIF is grounded in a unified approach to data collection and data analytics. This approach is facilitated through a set of elementary and advanced units of analysis that, as a whole, create an investigative vantage point for honing fieldwork and conducting data analysis. The elementary units include nodes (actors), ties (relations) and transactions. They are among the most basic constituting components of corrupt schemes. The advanced units of analysis capture the broader structures and processes of which elementary units form part. These structures and processes include network architecture, transaction sequences, node (actor) biographies and commercial/political repertoires, which as a totality helps to disclose the criminogenic motivations, opportunity structures and compliance cultures underpinning regionally specific forms of grand corruption.
Turning to the basic units of analysis, nodes designate the differentiated subjects (actors) and objects within a social system underpinning grand corruption. These include, for instance, individual actors, public institutions, corporate entities, valuable assets and forums (such as a conference or social club). Clearly, if grand corruption is to be empirically documented in its concrete, historical forms, key nodal points-such as 'fixers', front companies, political powerbrokers, targeted assets, important decision-making forums, and civil society actors mounting resistance-must be plotted. It is also vital that the ties linking nodes are traced. They might include ownership, partnership, kinship, contractor-client, employment or rivalry, to name just a few examples.
Of course, for a social system to exist, it must have active components that are instigating momentum. The transaction is a basic category designed to designate any single, identifiable action, which takes place within a social system. It might include, for example, the transfer of money between offshore bank accounts, or a government committee's decision to grant valuable economic rights to a particular firm.
The advanced units of analysis CIF employs have emerged inductively over a ten-year period, whilst researching grand corruption in the Pacific and Eurasia. They evolved out of finer-grained analyses conducted using the elementary units of analysis, which laid the foundation for building concepts capable of capturing the broader structures and processes, of which these molecular determinations are part. IJCJ&SD 32 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2017 6(4) The first advanced category, network architecture, focuses on the social network as an evolving totality, looking at the structured inter-relativeness between its constituting elements, and the concrete meanings these elements obtain as a result of the system to which they belong. For example, politician A may act as a bridge between investors B, C and D, and the President of a nation. By acting as a conduit between the investors and a paramount decision maker, politician A is able to fix public tenders using the President's office; while, the President enjoys insulation from the immediate zone of illicit activity, minimising the risk of exposure. From the President's vantage point, Politician A is a buffer; from the vantage point of the investors, he is a fixer; for both sides, Politician A is an asset. So network architecture is a frame that instigates a strategic focus on the dynamics that emerge from forms of inter-relatedness that can only be concretely uncovered by looking at the broader whole.
The transaction sequence is another advanced unit of analysis. It hones attention on interconnected transactions, authored by a single or by multiple entities. In effect, this frame focuses the investigative lens on the different ways in which transactions may connect together to form part of a sequence that drives a corrupt scheme from conception to fruition. For example, an overarching sequence may involve marshalling security force members to intimidate rivals, journalists and civil society, which occurs in tandem with the rigging of a government committee, so an oil contract is awarded to an offshore company, owned by members of the intelligence services, who provide kickbacks to the President. Meanwhile, lawyers, bankers and accountants are contracted to launder the proceeds into safe havens in Europe and North America. Elsewhere I have set out in greater detail precise techniques that can be used to reconstruct transaction sequences (see Lasslett forthcoming).
Node biography is another advanced unit of analysis. It hones attention on particular individual and organisational actors within a network, looking at their existence through a life-history lens.
Whether an individual, company or public institution, it becomes possible in some instances to capture how they have developed over time. In the case of individuals, this might include an expansion in particular forms of influence, the honing of specific skill-sets, and the command of key tools (for example, offshore accounts, shell companies, double accounting); or, in the case of organisations, the fostering of certain institutional cultures and customs, etcetera. Indeed, node biographies, in effect, offer a frame through which to understand how existing structures, processes, capacities and techniques potentially articulate a longer period of activity that has now congealed into criminogenic infrastructure, in the case of organisations, or expert personas proficient in illicit schemes, in the case of individuals.
By studying different node biographies and associated transaction sequences, established commercial and political repertoires that may exist in a particular field of practice can begin to be designated. These repertoires can expose enduring sets of techniques and informal bodies of knowledge, which individual nodes can master through association with skilled practitioners, so as to more effectively prosecute corrupt schemes within a specific sector of the economy, or within a particular government agency.
The fieldwork component of CIF is enacted using a number of digitally enhanced investigative methods, which aim to extract data from documentary records and interviews, that can help populate the elementary units of analysis outlined above. Once collected, the data sets are then coded and analysed using several techniques including investigative social network analysis (ISNA) and transaction mapping, which enables data relating to the elementary units of analysis to produce understandings that populate the advanced units of analysis, upon which theorisation and explanation can occur.
ISNA has been conducted using the community version of Maltego Casefile. Casefile allows node and tie data to be coded and mapped on digraphs (directional graphs) so that it can then be evaluated drawing on concepts developed within the social network analysis literature, which IJCJ&SD 33 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2017 6(4) help to disclose network power dynamics, weaknesses and vulnerabilities (see Figure 1 for the style of Maltego Casefile digraphic presentation). Transaction mapping compliments ISNA. Tiki-Toki was used to conduct the PNG research. This timeline software package allows transaction data to be plotted on a graph and coded on three bases: author, date and type (see Figure 2 for the style of Tiki-Toki graph presentation). As well as documentary research, semi-structured interviews were conducted with civil society organisations representing affected residents including the Paga Heritage Association, Paga Hill Arts Resistance, the National Housing Commission Residents' Association (Paga Hill) and the legal team retained to advance the residents' National Court action. In addition, interviews were conducted with two senior executives from the proponent, Paga Hill Development Company (PNG) Limited; the Member of Parliament for Moresby South; and a land conveyancing expert with direct knowledge of the project. This oral and documentary data was then analysed using CIF.
To that end, CIF's strength lies in data extraction, data consolidation and triangulation. Given grand corruption's opaque nature, CIF attempts to counter the substantial challenges fieldworkers face by generating a diverse range of information streams, tapped from numerous sources (as outlined above, for example). The aforementioned analytical tools sift relevant data connected to the elementary units of analysis from these streams. The information is then consolidated through data-modelling exercises using ISNA and transaction-mapping, which in turn allows the advanced units of analysis to be populated with processed data. This process of data analysis and triangulation as a totality aims to overcome weaknesses associated with any one data stream, or the fragmented way in which data will often be located during fieldwork.
On that note, I will now turn to the case study built using CIF.

Introduction
During 2016, the business press announced that the APEC summit, scheduled to be held in PNG's capital Port Moresby during 2018, would be co-hosted at a new luxury estate in the capital's harbour precinct valued at three billion Papua New Guinean Kina (K) (approximately US$1 billion). The Paga Hill Development Company (PNG) Limited (PHDC) is the lead partner in a developer coalition charged with responsibility for this megaproject known as the Paga Hill Estate (named after the hill upon which the development will be built; see PHDC also attracted attention because of its strong corporate social responsibility (CSR) policy. The keystone of this CSR policy, led by Dame Carol Kidu who is widely regarded as one of PNG's foremost human rights advocates, is its resettlement package for the communities displaced by the megaproject. This combination of professional excellence and human rights credibility led the United Nations Development Programme to formally commend PHDC.
However, on the margins of civil society, community activists allege that PHDC and its partners employed bribery, violence and intimidation to silence critics and forcefully displace residents (Fifer 2016). Research into these allegations began in 2012 using CIF, and continued for a further four years. A summary of the key findings will now be presented before looking at their theoretical implications. First, the social network underpinning the megaproject is examined; attention is also given to the important discoveries made after biographical data was collected on key executives at the centre of this network. I then turn to the transaction sequences which have been employed to enact the Paga Hill Estate, looking at the illicit moments which became apparent through the transaction mapping process. The case study concludes by looking at auxiliary players whose actions helped to buttress the developer's impunity. Throughout the presentation, CIF's techniques are referenced to demonstrate their impact on the data gathering and analysis process.

The social network behind the Paga Hill Estate and key actor biographies
The foundations of the Paga Hill megaproject rest on three core legal documents and two corporate entities. The three core legal documents are successive state leases that have been awarded over 13.7 hectares of land at Paga Hill known as portion 1597, a plot which had initially been reserved in 1987 as a national park. The first, a five-year Urban Development Lease, was issued to the Paga Hill Land Holding Company (PHLHC) in 1998. It was then transformed into a 99-year Business Lease in 2000. However, the lessee in this instance was a separate company, PHDC (see Diagram 1). A fresh 99-year Business Lease was issued over the property in 2009. Again the recipient was PHDC.

Diagram 1: Executive team behind PHLHC and PHDC
Source: Investment Promotion Authority The first Paga Hill leaseholder, PHLHC, is closely connected to Gudmundur Fridriksson, and a prominent PNG businessman, Rex Paki. Paki was both a shareholder and director of PHLHC. 4 The other shareholders were Felix Leyagon-an employee at Paki's accountancy company-and Fidelity Management Pty Ltd. The latter entity is an Australian company, 5 owned by proxy shareholders 6 based at the accountancy firm Sothertons. When registered addresses extracted from PNG company records were cross-referenced with Fidelity's office at Sothertons in Western Australia, it became apparent that Gudmundur Fridriksson had used Sothertons as his registered address for a separate PNG holding company. 7 This strongly suggested he was linked to Fidelity Management, in addition to being a PHLHC director. The second main corporate vehicle, PHDC, which has held two state leases over portion 1597, is more closely tied to Fridriksson, his Australian colleague, George Hallit, and the company's lawyer, Stanley Liria. During the fieldwork process, background checks were conducted on these core network nodes (actors).
These checks revealed that both Fridriksson and Paki had been implicated by public oversight institutions and journalists in a range of illegal activities. For example, Fridriksson had managed and owned companies censured in two media exposés, two Auditor General's Office reports, four Public Accounts Committee inquiries, and the Commission of Inquiry into the Department of Finance (Table 1). IJCJ&SD 37 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2017 6(4) The first footprints, in this respect, emerged in the Icelandic press, where doubts were raised over a major Chinese industrial venture spearheaded by Fridriksson (Jónsson 1992). This was followed by articles in the Hong Kong media. Fridriksson was reported as having been sued for substantial arrears in rent and hotel tariffs (Laxton and Cheung 1993;Ng and Wan 1993). More substantive information on Fridriksson's commercial affairs emerged after he relocated to PNG, following his marriage to Air Nuigini flight attendant, Tauhura Asigau, whom he met in Hong Kong.
The couple launched a company, Destination PNG, which soon raised eyebrows when it was awarded a major book writing and publishing contract worth K$2.5 million (approx. US$1.92 million) by the PNG Government. The book was to celebrate 20 years of independence in PNG. Australian Broadcasting Corporation correspondent, Sean Dorney, claimed the contract was five times the going market rate (Dorney 1996 RAM the only result that could be reported to the Public Curator was a small amount of computer equipment'. RAM also featured in the Commission of Inquiry into the National Provident Fund. The Commission concluded Paki and his firm were party to a complex fraud, from which they allegedly benefited through charging excessive fees via a contract secured through 'nepotism', and in violation of tendering requirements (Barnett 2002 A distinct theme emerging from the evidence contained in the anti-corruption reporting and court archives is the existence of a reoccurring commercial strategy. In the accounts uncovered in these documents, a particular legitimate service is offered that appears in practice to be a conduit for forms of hidden, improper activity which are designed to capture an amplified share of revenues from vulnerable consumers (accepting that, ostensibly, the liberal-democratic state manages public funds on behalf of citizen consumers). In other words, whether it be deceased estates, a company in liquidation, a superannuation fund, or government agency, the consumer clientbeneficiaries, creditors, retirees, the public-was in a vulnerable position as their interests were represented largely by institutions lacking integrity. As a result, the businesses concerned were able to negotiate inflated prices for services provided and it was this augmented return which appears to have been the common thread connecting different cases cited above. On occasions, the agents acting on behalf of the consumer client were shown to be sharing in the exaggerated profits. The evidence also suggests the executives involved were largely indifferent to the particular service provided: the opportunity for exaggerated profits appeared to be the prime lure. Furthermore, not only were state actors complicit in the activity, there was mostly no followup action by law enforcement agencies or the departments involved even when PNG's public oversight agencies censured the conduct, a systemic problem that continues in PNG to this day.
Speaking more generally, this also points to the way in which capitalist political economies generate a significant opportunity structure for what David Harvey (1976) refers to as secondary forms of exploitation. This references the methods used by capital, as a heterogeneous class formation, to extract wealth, largely from the labouring masses, outside the moment of production; for instance, where a 'slum' landlord, or an energy cartel, gouge consumers through inflated and/or fixed prices. Of course, speculative stratas of capital whose business model is rooted in secondary forms of exploitation are indifferent to which revenues are preyed upon, whether it be a pension pot, wages, or taxation. Therefore, it is a modality of exploitation that can assume parasitic forms from an intra-class perspective.
On that note, it appears from the anti-corruption reporting that two key executives behind the Paga Hill Estate are part of this speculative strata. That raises the question of how this speculative repertoire extracted from the biographies helps to explain the transaction chain underpinning the Paga Hill Estate development, a matter to which I now turn.

The Paga Hill Estate: Acquiring the land, evicting the residents
Paga Hill is divided into a series of land portions; the paramount owner is the government of PNG. 12 The primary portion of land covering Paga Hill's contested southern face is known as portion 1597. Until 2014, portion 1597 encompassed homes belonging to the government's public housing authority, the National Housing Corporation, in addition to part of an informal settlement which was established on the site shortly after WWII, with permission from customary owners (who were, and are, fighting for reinstatement of their customary title), and government acquiescence. In total approximately 3,400 people lived on the hill (see Figure 4). From 1987 until 1999, portion 1597 had been protected from any further development after it was zoned open space, and declared a National Park. 13 Therefore, during the data collection and analysis process, the primary objective was to document the transaction sequences which led to the reversal of this policy, and the awarding of National Park land to a concern seeking to build 'a tourism city'. The seismic policy shift was in effect a symptomatic signal; the investigative methodology then entered as a diagnostic tool which aimed to uncover the processes underlying this irregular shift.
First, key legal/administrative documents relating to the land deal upon which the Paga Hill Estate rests were sourced. This involved leveraging contacts with Port Moresby professionals working in the land conveyancing field. Further checks were then conducted at the Department of Lands and Physical Planning, which stores property data on its LAGIS Land Management System. Copies of the relevant government gazettes recording the decisions to rezone the land and award it to PHDC and PHLHC were also located. In order to better understand the interrelationship between the landed transaction sequences and the corporate history of the latter organisations, company record data were triangulated with land transactions, modelled using both ISNA and transaction mapping.
To enhance analytical rigour, the author developed a working knowledge of the Land Act 1996 (PNG), Land Regulation 1999 (PNG) and Physical Planning Act 1989 (PNG), in addition to the Companies Act 1997 (PNG) and Investment Promotion Act 1992 (PNG). This legislative material prescribes, for instance, set process that must be observed when acquiring a state lease or when registering to conduct business in PNG as a foreign enterprise. The challenge then became one of carefully mapping the content of key land, corporate and public records in order to detect whether anomalies occurred in the processes through which the land was acquired. Both ISNA IJCJ&SD 42 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2017 6(4) and transaction mapping are designed to act as clinical tools that help pinpoint these illicit moments from vast and often fragmented data sets.
The first transaction of note was the incorporation of PHLHC, which became the initiating vehicle for the land venture. The company was incorporated on 14 June 1996. Soon after incorporation, PHLHC initiated legal steps to have the Paga Hill land rezoned from open space, paving the way for a state lease over the property to be issued. Their initial planning application was rejected by the Physical Planning Board on 11 November 1996. 14 Several months later, however, the company secured political support from the Minister for Civil Aviation, Culture and Tourism, Michael Nali. Nali undertook to have the development endorsed by Cabinet as a 'property of National Significance'. 15 Company records reveal that Nali acquired a 9 per cent stake in PHLHC's successor vehicle, PHDC, on 16 December 2011 through his company Kwadi Inn Limited. 16 By this stage, Nali had lost his seat in parliament. Arguably of greater concern, at the time Nali undertook to sponsor the project, he jointly owned a company, Waim No. 54, with Mary Nali. 17  To lawfully conduct business in PNG, PHDC now required certification from the Investment Promotion Authority (see 32 (4), Investment Promotion Act 1992 (PNG)). 21 There is no record on the foreign certification registry to show that this took place. Following the successful eviction of all residents from Paga Hill, ground work operations at the site began (see Figure 5). Meanwhile, the O'Neill government has agreed to act as an official development partner in the project, making it 'one of the country's biggest public-private partnership (PPP) projects' (The National 2016). To summarise, a close examination of the transaction sequences underpinning the Paga Hill Estate reveals numerous anomalies, which indicate portion 1597 has potentially been awarded and administered in violation of the Land Act 1996 (PNG) and Land Regulation 1999 (PNG). Furthermore, for a period, the core corporate entity steering the transaction sequence, PHDC, appeared to operate in PNG as an uncertified foreign enterprise. Compounding matters, a Public Accounts Committee report pointed to further legal breaches, concluding that the land had been secured corruptly by foreign speculators. These anomalies and conclusions, however, have not irreparably harmed PHDC's fortunes. Through the turbulence, PHDC successfully leveraged its ties and influence, to secure national government backing for the project.
Crucially, this backing has allowed the company to maintain its control over a piece of land-at a discounted rate-which, once developed, will potentially allow PHDC to realise significant rents from this unique monopoly over harbourside property, in a market suffering notable shortages in supply. To appreciate the characteristics of this transaction, it must be situated within a broader theory of capitalist social relations and secondary exploitation.
To that end, from the perspective of investors, property titles are financial papers that gives them claim over future revenues through the lever of rents (which can be capitalised through sale). That is, a legally sanctioned monopoly over a particular space (via private property regimes) allows a charge to be levied, paid out of the consumer's revenues, which could come from wages, salaries, profits of enterprise, taxes, etcetra (Harvey 1976(Harvey , 2012Marx 1981). In this sense, money invested in real property accumulates by feeding on the revenue generated elsewhere in the productive economy (Harvey 2012).
In the case of property investors in PNG who primarily acquire landed monopolies through the vehicle of state leases, the equation is slightly more complex. Annual rent must be paid to the PNG government based on the land's unimproved value. The investor, therefore, speculates on the rent differential between the annual rent owed to the state, and the rent which can be extracted from the market. There is scope here for the rate of return to be increased through different forms of manipulative practice, which can take lawful, improper and illegal forms. For example, by artificially reducing the cost of acquiring the lease, illegally/improperly reducing the annual rent owed to the state, minimising the transaction costs associated with government approvals, ignoring time-bound contractual stipulations, and escaping competitive market pressures with state acquiescence, the investors are in a position to potentially amplify their rate of return.
It is apparent in the Paga Hill case that the developer coalition drew upon pre-established repertoires honed in other sectors in a bid to manipulate the rate of return, a dynamic which, of course, CIF is designed to uncover. In this instance, the methodology revealed evidence that key executives leveraged personal ties and influence, and exploited weaknesses in urban governance, in ways that enabled them to decrease rents, reduce acquisition costs, and escape competitive pressures. Again, these tactics were premised on a paramount asset-holder-the PNG people, through the auspices of the agent-state-being in a weak position. Compounding matters in this respect, their agent, the Lands Department, has a demonstrated history of acting improperly in support of private speculators, over and above their mandated responsibility to the PNG people. Thus, in the real estate sector, the core ingredients that this commercial repertoire-documented in the previous section-draws upon to extract super-profits can be observed.
However, as opposed to ventures such as a book publishing deal with the national government, or the provision of corporatisation services to the Public Curator's Office, for the Paga Hill land to render a substantial return, it will require a significant inward investment of capital. This has proven a critical variation to past ventures pursued by Paga Hill Estate executives. As a result, the transaction sequence has been elongated as the developer attempts to clean its image, and project the right balance of expertise, professional experience and political backing for an exercise of this scope. It is not clear whether the company will succeed in this respect.
IJCJ&SD 47 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2017 6(4) Nevertheless, mobilisation and counter-mobilisation within civil society has played-and continues to play-a critical role in determining the megaproject's public fortunes, a matter which will now be addressed.

Resisting and counter-resistance to the Paga Hill Estate
Paga Hill residents resisting displacement organised themselves through three civil society organisations. The Paga Heritage Association managed the community's legal defence in partnership with the National Housing Corporation Residents' Committee (interview, Joe Moses, 18 July 2013). Complementing this activity, Paga Hill Arts Resistance channelled community energy into public education through demonstrations, art exhibitions and theatre (interview, Ratoos Gary Haoapa and Pius Wasi, 14 July 2013). They were supported by two international civil society actors: critical research on the proposed development, and the corporate actors behind it was disseminated by the International State Crime Initiative; while a documentary film-maker, Hollie Fifer (2016), presented these research findings and the community's story through a feature length production, The Opposition.
To counter community resistance, PHDC also mobilised support from within civil society. She physically intervened to stop the eviction, and was forcefully escorted from the scene by police. When Kidu (2012) was later criticised for her 'emotional' reaction, she responded in the national press, stating: 'Yes I am emotional about the blatant corruption, greed and land theft in "modern" PNG'. Her involvement brought to the grass-roots movement emerging on Paga Hill a range of contacts and an immense public profile. During July 2012, Kidu retired from politics, and focused her attention on numerous civil society roles.
Then on 1 October 2012, Kidu incorporated a consultancy company, CK Consultancy Limited. 35 With her strong human rights profile, Kidu became a popular choice for companies looking to rehabilitate their public image such as Canadian miner, Barrick Gold and Rio Tinto subsidiary, Bougainville Copper Limited. However, as far as the Paga Hill case was concerned, it was her decision to accept a consultancy contract with PHDC that struck a significant blow against the resistance movement.
In total, CK Consultancy Limited was paid AU$178,000 (approx. US$160,000) by the developer to help relocate residents from Paga Hill to customary land in the Six Mile area of Port Moresby, which they would have to rent from customary owners through insecure contractual agreements (Radio New Zealand International 2014). Kidu featured prominently on the developer's promotional material and in media set pieces. She also published a formal letter of apology for her role in the campaign to save Paga Hill. 36 Coupled with this public about-face, Kidu adopted an adversarial stance with former allies. For instance, she launched a civil action in the New South Wales Supreme Court against the documentary filmmaker Hollie Fifer. The action threatened to silence the feature film on Paga Hill-which captures Dame Carol's notable shift in stance-just as it was about to premiere at a prestigious film festival in Canada.
During the subsequent trial, it was revealed that PHDC had 'agreed to indemnify the Plaintiff [Kidu] in respect of her costs of these proceedings and also has paid the AU$250,000.00 [in The complex network of support that rallied behind the Paga Hill Estate in opposition to the grassroots resistance campaign is not dealt with in its entirety here. It included, however, charitable organisations to whom PHDC donated money; national media outlets which regularly published testimonials celebrating the project; public relations experts who helped reform the venture's digital face and public brand; and numerous government Ministers who championed the development in public forums. Nevertheless, a trend observable in the data is the synthesis between money capital and cultural/symbolic capital.
In contrast to the resistance efforts, which forged ties through a fabric of shared political, intellectual and social interests, the developer coalition rallied support from civil society organisations that, officially speaking, strongly rejected many of the key tactics employed in the megaproject. This feat appears to have been rooted in part on the strategic dispersal of money capital, both through consultancy contracts and donations, which helped fuse PHDC to organisations which could advance its legitimising agenda. The fact that such organisations professed goals antagonistic to the repertories employed by PHDC and its project partners made their support all the more powerful. The data also points to the key role which civil society organisations can play in administering 'backdoor' attacks designed to hinder and delegitimise resistance movements operating from the margins of civil society.

From investigation to theory: Conceptualising the hidden and routine
A core argument underpinning this intervention is that the development of systematic units of analysis, matched to investigative research methods and digital analytics, has the potential to illuminate the hidden networks and processes essential to the organisation of grand corruption in its regionally specific forms. The Paga Hill Estate-which the Public Accounts Committee (2007: 60) claims was secured for its current owners through 'corrupt dealings'-offers an example of CIF's probative power. To conclude, the theoretical implications of the empirical findings, and the methodology it rests upon will now be presented.
The Paga Hill Estate case study draws into sharp focus the notable difference between appearance and substance when researching processes that potentially fit within the rubric of grand corruption. This assertion has two layers. First, at the level of appearance, the Paga Hill Estate enjoys all the distinctive marks of corporate social responsibility: wide acclaim from human rights advocates and esteemed civil society organisations; an executive team with CVs boasting connections with high profile, socially sensitive projects; and strong engagement with charitable organisations. However, once this semblance was subjected to sustained investigative inquiry, a more ambiguous essence emerged, which was marked by speculative commercial repertoires that fused with a permissive urban governance regime to facilitate illicit transactions, whilst criticism was diluted through the strategic dispersal of money-capital.
Second, the substantive reality, which emerged following fieldwork and data analysis, grates against popular stereotypes of activity frequently described as 'corrupt' in PNG. Notable by their absence are 'big-men' politicians most commonly associated with illicit activities in PNG, although they played an important auxiliary role in the Paga Hill Estate project. Nevertheless, in this case, it was expatriate business figures who largely appear to be the prime movers of a project deemed corrupt (Public Accounts Committee 2007). Furthermore, once the transaction sequences were examined, this case, when set against a broader commercial repertoire, was clearly not a conventional instance of misappropriation, which is a common trope for thinking about corruption in PNG. Rather, it pointed to a more hidden-and arguably more routine-type of illicit activity, marked by regulatory and market manipulation, practices which are designed to dilute competitive pressures and gouge vulnerable asset-holders. Such routine hidden activity, however, only becomes apparent if sensitive methodologies are deployed to capture the intricate ways corporate, commercial and political mechanisms are applied over prolonged temporal stretches in order to amplify pecuniary returns.
These findings raise a number of important questions. To what extent are public and scholarly perceptions of activity, which fit within the grand corruption frame, shaped by understandings grounded in spectacular instances of corruption rather than its common, routinised, lengthy and often unsanctioned forms? And what are the potential consequences of the cleavage between perception and reality, for how corruption is theorised and people's reaction to it?
Certainly, in the scholarly literature on PNG, variations of neo-patrimonial theory are frequently employed to make sense of grand corruption (see, for example, Kombako 2007;Kurer 2007;Larmour 2008;Standish 2007). Put simply, this argument explains corruption through the particular way individual identity, political groupings and business relations in PNG have become organised around clientalistic networks based on loose forms of ethnic/social solidarity, that become the prime levers around which decisions are made. While this framing certainly offers important insights into the mechanics of influence within elite circles and the tactics employed by ruling class cliques to diffuse resistance from below, it does not necessarily capture all the dynamics revealed by investigative research.
For example, in PNG, approximately 85 per cent of the population remains rurally seated in largely independent and autonomous customary agglomerations, where there is a strong IJCJ&SD 50 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2017 6(4) dependence on sustainable land use, and informal modes of governance fixed by customary norms. Furthermore, owing to the remoteness of many communities, combined with poor transport/communications infrastructure and a nascent civil society, there is ostensibly little in the way of formal democratic conversation away from national elections, which are primarily a superficial affair. As a result, the rural majority are largely spectators with an extremely curtailed view when it comes to formal economic and political activity.
Against this backdrop, an emerging body of investigative evidence suggests that the practice of grand corruption in PNG in part facilitates the neo-colonial looting of national resources and revenue flows (see, for example, Numapo 2013; Oakland Institute 2013; Oxfam Australia 2014). The beneficiaries of this process include foreign capital and a class of local fixers, managers and collaborators, who accumulate political power and wealth from mediating the activities (which is not to discount the growing role nationals play in organising, and benefiting from, swindles).
Certainly, in the Paga Hill Estate case study, evidence and reporting were cited that document a business clique led by Australian-based executives. They are alleged to have leveraged a network of personal and commercial ties to circumvent different forms of market regulation and competition, in order to inflate profit yields from service contracts and to acquire a prime state asset at a discounted price. In both instances, this saw a higher proportion of state revenues being taken (or denied) by those companies concerned than if they had observed governance norms. This pattern of deviant conduct can also be observed more widely in PNG, including in the forestry, fisheries, and real-estate sectors, and in the significant market for government contracts relating to infrastructure development and professional services. The cumulative effect of this activity is that a privileged nexus of national powerbrokers and a foreign investor class are seizing a growing share of national revenues and assets through deviant means, to the detriment of working class households and a sizable landed peasantry.
To understand this regionalised dynamic gleamed from investigative research, supplementation of more orthodox frameworks-such as neopatrimonialism-is needed, with theoretical approaches capable of unpacking the ways that global capitalism is able to systemically foster stratas of speculative investors who employ market/commercial transactions to yield superprofits, through various forms of manipulation. Elsewhere I have argued this requires a serious reengagement with Marx's theoretical work (Lasslett 2013(Lasslett , 2014Lasslett et al. 2015), which offers an overarching framework for understanding how a global system rooted in the extraction of surplus value can also foster muscular tracts of secondary exploitation (Lasslett forthcoming).
Additionally, when thinking about this dynamic in settings such as PNG, there is persuasive evidence that this theory could yield more results if married to insights developed within the neocolonial canon. The latter body of theory helps focus attention on the way geographically-rooted forms of north/south exploitation can be maintained within a post-colonial setting of notionally independent nation-states. Continuing exploitation is ultimately defined by enduring disparities of power, which see exploitative and iniquitous relations maintained through a new armoury of techniques and methods.
This leads to the final point. CIF and other novel methodological approaches being developed by investigative researchers are not only a means for building rich descriptions of potentially corrupt practices. They are also a critical instrument for achieving more nuanced theoretical approximations of the mechanisms, processes and structures that sustain different regionalised regimes of grand corruption. Only when there is a mass of data sets that are systematic and capable of detecting grand corruption even in its most subtle and opaque forms can the building of robust theoretical traditions that help explain this phenomenon begin. All of these points put into question how effective existing anti-corruption efforts can be when such a theoretical task remains in an embryonic state to this day.