Short abstract:
In environments of deep informality, corruption is not a malfunction of administration but part of how governance works. Permits, contracts and decisions from authorities are not granted on equal terms. The law is not simply broken — it is applied to some and suspended for others. The question is therefore not who is guilty, but what decides who is protected and who is exposed.

Drawing on fifty interviews with businesspeople in Moscow and Kyiv, and on three decades of work in the post-communist region, the lecture shows how some come to be left alone by inspectors and prosecutors, what this costs them, and what happens when protection ends. It then asks why such practices survive cycles of reform. The framework proposed compares the constellation of actors and informal rules in a particular place, which makes it usable across countries, regions, and sectors.

The final part concerns Ukraine’s reconstruction and the European accession process. A rebuilding effort without parallel is moving towards the positions where control over money is easiest to seize, while the usual anticorruption instruments — perception indices, compliance checklists, beneficial-ownership registers — confirm that formal requirements have been observed. The risk settles where those instruments do not reach: an impeccable audit may simply mean that the leak is where the audit does not look. For a company, this is the uncomfortable part: it may do everything correctly and still have no assurance of how it will be treated.

The lecture closes with a set of questions that each participant can apply to the country and the sector they know best. The discussion is open to participants working in international cooperation and funding projects.

Short bio:
Michael Derrer is Professor of Economic Sociology at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU). He has worked for three decades in Central and Eastern Europe as a consultant, company director and certified legal interpreter in more than ten languages, including Romanian. The research presented appears in full in a trilogy with Peter Lang Academic Publishers (2026–2027); further info can be found at hslu.ch/beyondintegrity.

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This event is part of series of public lectures within the framework of the Politics, Legitimacy and Representation in Strained Societies (POLARIS) research group at New Europe College, supported by UEFISCDI – The Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding of the Ministry of Research and Education of Romania (PN-IV-P8-8.1-PRE-HE-ORG-2023-0055).