Peter Godber

Peter Godber was a Hong Kong chief superintendent whose escape from a corruption investigation in 1973 produced the anti-corruption commission that changed the territory. Police corruption in colonial Hong Kong was not incidental but organised: syndicates collected from gambling, prostitution and drugs on a fixed schedule and distributed upward, and officers spoke of getting on the bus, running alongside the bus, or standing in front of it. An inquiry into Godber found assets of some 4.3 million Hong Kong dollars, about six times his total career earnings. Ordered to explain them, he used his airport pass to walk past immigration and flew to London. The public reaction - student marches under the slogan fight corruption, catch Godber - forced the governor to act, and the Independent Commission Against Corruption was created in 1974, reporting only to him and outside the police entirely. Godber was extradited in 1975, convicted of conspiracy and bribery, and served four years. Some three thousand serving officers mutinied in 1977 over the pace of the prosecutions and were granted a partial amnesty for earlier offences, which was the compromise that let the commission survive. Hong Kong went from systemic police corruption to one of the least corrupt jurisdictions in Asia within a generation. He returned to England, lived quietly under another name and died in 2011, and almost nothing was written about him for decades. The commission he caused is now studied as the standard model for an anti-corruption body: independent powers of arrest, a separate reporting line, and prevention and education arms alongside investigation. Several jurisdictions have copied its structure directly.

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