How the World Bank’s own anti-corruption unit fabricated evidence, suppressed witnesses, and waged a five-year campaign to destroy the firm that refused to pay bribes – and how the Bank’s own judges exposed it.
In June 2025, the World Bank Sanctions Board – a tribunal of independent external judges – cleared Unicon Ltd. of every allegation brought against it by the Bank’s Integrity Vice Presidency (INT). In doing so, the Board issued thirteen separate critical findings about INT’s own conduct, calling it “disingenuous,” “deeply troubling,” “speculative,” “unconvincing,” and “materially deficient.” No prior decision in the Sanctions Board’s history has contained this weight of direct criticism aimed at the Bank’s own prosecutors.
This report documents how the case was built and why it collapsed. It catalogues seventeen documented acts of misconduct – from a deliberately mistranslated letter and a fabricated internal memo to a missing witness transcript that INT first confirmed at the hearing and then claimed had never existed because of Covid-19. It traces the institutional motives that explain why the Bank deployed INT against the firm that had refused bribes on every World Bank-financed project it worked on. And it sets out, in the Bank’s own words, what the Bank’s most senior officials were told about the misconduct, when they were told, and how they responded.
The report is written for a general audience. It is built on the Sanctions Board’s own published Decision No. 145, on documented correspondence with the Bank’s leadership, on international arbitration awards in Unicon’s favour, and on the contemporaneous record of INT’s conduct.
It also documents what happened after the verdict. In October 2025, four months after the Sanctions Board’s verdict had publicly condemned INT’s conduct, the Bank’s litigation manager wrote to Unicon threatening new sanctions proceedings if the firm continued to disclose what the judges had revealed. The threat was issued in writing, copied to the World Bank’s President, Vice Presidents, Executive Directors, and General Counsel. None of them intervened. The email chain is enclosed alongside the report. It documents what the report describes – that the same sanctions process the Bank used to prosecute Unicon for five years on fabricated evidence is now being used to threaten the firm into silence about that prosecution.
The complete report is available below.
