Biographies

Organisers

Dr. Jannine Poletti Hughes

Jannine Poletti Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in Accounting and Finance and Co-Founder of the Latin American and Hispanic Studies (LAHS) at the University of Liverpool, Management School. She obtained her PhD degree in Economics from the University of York, and before joining the academic sector, she worked as a Financial Analyst at the National Commission of Banking and Securities in Mexico. Her research interests include Corporate Governance and its interaction with corporate value, risk-taking, financial distress and fraud, focusing on the Latin America Market. She is a fellow of the National Researchers Institute (CONACyT, Mexico) and has been twice awarded a prize for her research on corporate finance by the Mexican Institute of Financial Executives and Ernst and Young.

Professor David Hojman

David Hojman is Professor of Economics and International Business and Co-Founder of LAHS at ULMS.  He came to Liverpool as a joint appointee in the University’s Centre (which eventually became the Institute) for Latin American Studies.  He has published widely in practically all the major academic journals of Latin American Studies.  His related current research interests concentrate upon the relationships between institutional design and corruption, with emphasis on the effects of regulation and the amount of room for arbitrary decision-making by government officials, the relationships between national and subnational cultures and corruption, and the dimensions and characteristics of corruption during the second government of Michele Bachelet in Chile in 2014-2018. 

 

Invited Speakers

Professor David Whyte

David Whyte is Professor of Socio-legal Studies in the School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool.  He is currently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (2017-2019) working on a long-term research project on corruption in the UK and the developed world.  His research and teaching interests are focused on the connections between law and corporate power.  He is the author of The Violence of Austerity (Pluto, 2017 ed. with Vickie Cooper) Corporate Human Rights Violations: Global Prospects for Legal Action (Routledge, 2017 with Stefanie Khoury).  He is a regular contributor to Red Pepper, Open Democracy, Bella Caledonia and The Guardian.

Professor Alan Doig

Alan Doig is currently a Visiting Professor, Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University; previously he was Professor of Public Services Management at Liverpool and Teesside Business Schools where he devised and led the first MA in Fraud Management for UK police, public and private sector investigators and investigation managers. He is author of a number of practitioner studies on corruption, including for the UNDP and UNODC, various academic articles and books on corruption, fraud and financial crime, has been the Council of Europe’s full-time Resident Advisor in Turkey for public ethics and prevention of corruption and the resident UNODC UNCAC mentor to Thailand. Since then he has worked on a number of UK and international projects for the City of London police, UK National Fraud Authority, the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment, the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, ABA-ROLI , the EC, IntegrityAction, OECD, Transparency International (Berlin), UNDP, and World Bank.

Dr Neil Pyper

Dr Neil Pyper is an Associate Head of the School of Strategy and Leadership at Coventry University. He also has over a decade of experience as a political risk analyst and consultant, focusing on the political economy of Latin America. These interests have continued in his academic career. In addition to research interests on emerging market multinationals and strategic foresight, he continues to advise a number of leading political risk consultancies.

Dr. Marieke Riethof

Dr. Marieke Riethof completed her PhD at the University of Amsterdam in Political Science and International Relations with a focus on Latin American Politics. Her research has focused on political strategies of the labour movement in Brazil, including the Latin American regional context. Her latest research focuses on Brazilian foreign policy in the context of international relations in Latin America.  Her articles and interviews on Brazilian and Latin American politics have appeared on BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Business News Radio (the Netherlands), and in the Independent, Newsweek, Daily Mail online, the Conversation, Business Insider, among others.

Professor Yacine Belghitar

Professor Yacine Belghitar domain of research is at the intersection of Finance, Small Business and Corporate Strategic Management Decisions. He contributes to the understanding of the effect of managerial risk attitude on the relationship between corporate governance and managerial compensation. His recent research on managerial compensation and risk taking has been funded by ESRC, the UK's most prestigious social science funding body. Yacine is currently serving as the associate editor of Frontiers in Finance and Economics Journal which presents original peer reviewed research in Finance and Economics that is applicable to the business community at large. He has published extensively and his papers have appeared in top international academic journals such as Economic Journal, Journal of Financial Research, Journal of Banking and Finance, and Small Business Economics.

Professor Paul Heywood

Professor Paul Heywood is the Sir Francis Hill Professor of European Politics, Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Nottingham. Professor Heywood is author, co-author or editor of eighteen books and more than eighty journal articles and book chapters. His research focuses on political corruption, institutional design and state capacity in contemporary Europe. Recent funded research includes an ESRC/Hong Kong project on Integrity Management in the UK, HK and China, an EU FP7 project, ANTICORRP, on anti-corruption policies, and TACOD, an EU project on tackling corruption through open data. He was the UK Local Research Correspondent on Corruption (2012-16) for the European Commission's DG Home Affairs, helping to produce an EU Anti-Corruption Report. In 2015, Professor Heywood was appointed leader of a £3.6m British Academy/DFID Anti-Corruption Evidence programme (2015-18), designed to identify new initiatives that can help developing countries tackle the scourge of corruption and the negative impact it has on the lives of millions of people. The programme was subsequently extended until 2021 with an additional £5.5m support from DFID.

Martin Whitehead

Martin is a qualified accountant and has spent his professional career working in the ‘Big 4’ accounting firms specialising in investigating fraud and corruption in the public and private sectors, which has seen him work in more than 20 countries. In his work he has uncovered numerous types of earnings manipulation, including accounting fraud, bribery, and asset mis-appropriation. He is keen to leverage his practical experience in his academic studies to help develop our understanding of how and why corporate wrongdoing occurs and how its impact manifests in the short and medium term. Martin is currently pursuing his PhD at Cranfield School of Management. He is looking at how earnings management, disclosure and corporate governance practices are affected in the face of major financial scandal events which serve to severely tarnish a firm’s reputation and diminish its legitimacy. This research involves applying qualitative and quantitative techniques to interpret data through a number of theoretical lenses, including legitimacy, stakeholder and stewardship theory.