Published by Gbaf News
Posted on September 19, 2018
6 min readLast updated: January 21, 2026
Taking anti-corruption enforcement to a new level, the World Bank Group today announced the debarment of two companies and, separately, the first-ever World Bank cross-debarments of firms, for engaging in corrupt and fraudulent practices in development projects. The announcement comes on the eve of the International Corruption Hunters Network meeting, which takes place December 6 – 8 at the World Bank’s headquarters.
“These enforcement actions are timely, coming as they do just before our meeting next week with the International Corruption Hunters Alliance.Our hope is that the Alliance will facilitate our investigations and increase their impact to further eliminate fraud and corruption risks impacting development resources,” said Leonard McCarthy, World Bank Vice President for Integrity (INT). “An important item on our agenda is stepping up enforcement action as part of a global enforcement regime. These are examples of cases that could be scaled up with the support of Alliance members given the network’s multi-jurisdictional impact.” He also added that managing fraud and corruption risks is a prominent feature of the World Bank Group’s Governance and Anticorruption (GAC) agenda.
Kwaplah International Trading Co., Inc., a U.S.-based company, and its owner, Mr. Sherlock Mahn, together with any organization they directly or indirectly control, have been debarred for 12 years for engaging in corrupt and fraudulent practices in Bank-financed projects implemented in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Ukraine, Ghana, Gambia and Liberia. This is the second-longest debarment since the Bank began sanctioning firms in 1999. In making its decision, the World Bank’s Sanctions Board took into account the multiplicity of sanctionable practices committed by the company among other considerations. “This Sanctions Board Decision has laid down some brightline rules, following an extensive INT investigation that crossed multiple jurisdictions,” said Mr. McCarthy. “Companies and individuals who misuse development resources should know that, together with our partners, we are stepping up the fight against fraud and corruption, and they will be caught,” he added. In addition, the World Bank Sanctions Board debarred another company, “Elkri” for three years for engaging fraudulent practices in a Bank-financed project in Albania. The debarment may be reduced to two years upon implementation of an effective corporate compliance program. These rulings are eligible for cross debarment under the April 2010 Agreement for Mutual Enforcement of Debarment Decisions entered into by the African Development Bank Group, Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the World Bank Group and the Inter-American Development Bank Group. Under the agreement, entities debarred by one multilateral development bank (MDB) may be sanctioned for the same misconduct by other participating development banks, which translates into collective enforcement action. Based on that agreement, the World Bank also announced the its first cross-debarments, sanctioning 12 companies previously debarred by the Asian Development Bank for engaging in fraudulent and corruption practices in some of their projects. “Since the signing of the Cross-Debarment agreement earlier this year, INT has worked diligently with our MDB partners to ensure that enforcement is not delayed,” said McCarthy.“This enforcement action is sending a very powerful signal of how the global anticorruption landscape is fast forwarding. This progress cannot be reversed,” he added. About the International Corruption Hunters AllianceOver 200 anti-corruption officials from more than 134 countries will meet for the first time at the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington on December 6-8, 2010 to help facilitate the investigation and prosecution of corrupt actors, including those who defraud World Bank projects. The meeting of the International Corruption Hunters Alliance, which flows from regional networks of anticorruption enforcement personnel the World Bank established over the past two years, will enable officials from developing countries to interact with counterparts from OECD countries, share information, and work toward a global enforcement regime.
Replacing backup technology with Zerto’s IT Resilience Platform significantly improves data recovery speeds, visibility and compliance reporting process
Zerto, the industry leader for IT resilience, today announced that Adams Bank & Trust, a full service financial institution, has implemented the company’s IT Resilience Platform. With Zerto,
Adams Bank & Trust continuously protects its critical business applications and customer data from unplanned disruptions, including ransomware, and has significantly improved its data recovery point objectives, data visibility and compliance reporting.
Adams Bank & Trust, a regional bank founded over 100 years ago with locations throughout Nebraska, Colorado and Kansas, was hit by several ransomware attacks in past years. To protect its data, the bank previously used tape backup technology that had lengthy six, 12, and 24 hour recovery point objectives. Although still used today for archiving, retrieving files and data following an attack or disruption was expensive, cumbersome and required countless man-hours that left significant room for human error during the data re-entry process.
Adams Bank & Trust implemented Zerto’s IT Resilience Platform in 2016 and saw immediate results. Zerto has allowed the bank to instantly replicate data to multiple local and remote sites, keeping data and applications continuously available and allowing for any point-in-time recovery for seamless rewind to moments before an outage or attack.
“Zerto has replaced almost all of our previous backup solutions, and with near instant replication, it’s easy to recover if we get hit by ransomware,” said Jason Glazebrook, Network Administrator, Adams Bank & Trust. “Now, if a ransomware attack happens, we’ll be able to recover in about an hour instead of up to 24 hours. With Zerto, we have clearer visibility of our protection level and a more robust first line of recovery. We can now rest assured knowing we are resilient against unplanned problems.”
Zerto also offers Adams Bank & Trust key automation and test failovers without impact to production, and will create audit and compliance reports for examiners, documenting the pass/fail of each step in the recovery process. Zerto’s single file-level recovery capabilities have also made recovering from user errors easy, particularly when it comes to data corruption. Additionally, Zerto offers complete visibility for monitoring across multiple sites, while workload mobility capabilities make it easy for the bank to migrate to new hardware as needed.
“An IT resilient mode of operations allows companies to be ready for any type of disruption – planned or unplanned – enabling businesses like Adams Bank & Trust to mitigate the risk of downtime or data loss, allowing them to focus on more strategic initiatives such as cloud, modernization and digital transformation,” said Caroline Seymour, Director, Product Marketing at Zerto.
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