Patricia Moreira was the managing director of the international secretariat of

Transparency International Transparency International e.V. (TI) is a German registered association founded in 1993 by former employees of the World Bank. Based in Berlin, its nonprofit and non-governmental purpose is to take action to combat global corruption with civil ...

, an organization that campaigns against corruption, between October 2017 and February 2020.

Early life and education

Moreira is Spanish-Brazilian. She has a BA in Economics from the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, ...

, Los Angeles, an

MBA A Master of Business Administration (MBA; also Master's in Business Administration) is a postgraduate degree focused on business administration. The core courses in an MBA program cover various areas of business administration such as accounti ...

from

INSEAD INSEAD, a contraction of "Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires" () is a non-profit business school that maintains campuses in Europe ( Fontainebleau, France), Asia (Singapore), the Middle East (Abu Dhabi, UAE), and North America (San ...

, France, and conducted PhD research in Social Entrepreneurship at ICADE University in Madrid.

Career

Moreira worked as a management consultant for Juárez & Associates and

Arthur D. Little Arthur D. Little is an international management consulting firm originally headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, founded in 1886 and formally incorporated in 1909 by Arthur Dehon Little, an MIT chemist who had discovered acetate. ...

for ten years, and then for the Spanish aid organisation Ayuda en Acción, rising to the position of director general. She was CEO of Ayuda en Acción from 2009. In October 2017, she succeeded

Cobus de Swardt Cobus de Swardt is a South African sociologist. He was head of Transparency International from 2007 to 2017, and is a former chair of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Agenda Council on Corruption. Education De Swardt earned an MPhil in Polit ...

as head of

. During her tenure, Moreira grew the organisation’s income and reduced its number of underfunded projects. Moreira was a board member of the

United Nations Global Compact The United Nations Global Compact is a non-binding United Nations pact to encourage businesses and firms worldwide to adopt sustainable and socially responsible policies, and to report on their implementation. The UN Global Compact is a princ ...

and a Council representative on the

International Land Coalition The International Land Coalition is a global alliance of civil society and Farmer#Farming organizations, farmers' organizations, United Nations' agencies, NGOs and research institutes. ILC's stated mission is to "promote secure and equitable acc ...

. In 2018 she spoke at the 18th

International Anti-Corruption Conference The International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) is a series of international conferences organised by the IACC Council, in association with local governments and organisations, with Transparency International as its secretariat. The conference ...

(IACC) in Copenhagen, Denmark, arguing that "corruption hits most the poor who suffer the consequences of corrupt regimes." In 2019, she admonished Western banks for facilitating corruption in Gambia. In 2019 she argued that citizen's rights and democratic institutions were threatened by the trend for more authoritarian and populist regimes across the world which should be resisted by greater checks and balances. A news article published in 2019 by The Guardian reported that staff at the Transparency International Secretariat complained about bullying and harassment within the organisation. Two investigations were launched after the allegations. The investigation conducted by the law firm Taylor Wessing documented individual incidents "in which the values/principles of transparency and accountability were not ensured entirely, and one case that might qualify as harassment at the workplace." The investigation concluded, however, that "these behaviours did not constitute a systematical breach of the TI-S Code of Conduct or TI values and its guiding principles, but were related to lack of open communication." Moreira disputed the findings of the investigation and claimed she had not been given a chance to respond to the allegations. Following a legal complaint from Moreira, Transparency International was forced to withdraw the publication of the investigation reports from its website. She also filed a complaint against the Board of Transparency International and claimed there were toxic office politics at the organisation. In February 2020, she was dismissed from

without explanation. It was claimed that Moreira's mandate and efforts to restructure the Transparency International Secretariat, and her own accusations of bullying made against Board members, upset entrenched interests at the organisation and ultimately led to her dismissal. Investigations specialist Harriet Witchell has stated that the Transparency International board’s handling of the complaints process was beset by conflicts of interest and failed to address allegations of misconduct made against the board.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Moreira, Patricia Living people University of California, Los Angeles alumni INSEAD alumni Year of birth missing (living people) Women chief executives Brazilian anti-corruption activists Management consultants Brazilian women activists Spanish women activists