Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko was named as the 2021 “Person of the Year” for the repression and violent actions.
In an announcement on Monday, December 27, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) said the panel of six judges “had no trouble selecting the post-Soviet autocrat” from the pool of 1,167 nominees, making it the first time in a decade that the decision was unanimous.
Afghanistan’s deposed president Ashraf Ghani was among the runners-up for ‘corrupt person of the year’ along with four other world leaders by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
“Ghani certainly deserves an award, too,” said Drew Sullivan, a co-founder of OCCRP who served as a judge on the panel. “He was breath-taking in both his corruption and his gross incompetence.”
“He deserted his people, leaving them to misery and death so he could live among the corrupt former state officials in the moral cesspool that is the UAE,” said Sullivan.
Other runners-up were Syrian president Bashar Hafez al-Assad, Turkish president Recip Tayyip Erdogan, and Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz.
The government of Afghanistan rapidly collapsed on August 15 and former president Ashraf Ghani fled the country in the face of lightning advances of the Islamic Emirate that followed U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw the American and NATO troops.
It was followed by a power takeover by the Islamic Emirate.
After the Islamic Emirate swept into power, the United States blocked nearly $9.5 billion in assets belonging to the Afghan central bank and restricted the new government from accessing the money.
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