How to steal – bigtime!

NO, THE PCIJ is really not in the business of teaching people how to be crooks. The training sessions that the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism holds for journalists are in fact geared towards catching crooks, their accomplices, and their patrons.

But in her latest post in her global investigative journalism blog Watchdog-Watcher, PCIJ founding executive director Sheila Coronel tells us how the bigtime crooks do it – not so we can learn from them, but so we can learn how to beat them, or at least catch them at their own game.

In the first part of her blog post 8 Ways to Commit Grand Corruption, Coronel gives us four of the favorite methods that political leaders like to use to squirrel away public funds. Nay, squirrel away is too tame a phrase for the grandiose manner in which Ferdinand Marcos, Muammar Gaddafi, or Hosni Mubarak haul away public funds by the billions.

Coronel promises a second installment of her blog post, where she will expose the other four favorite methods of, uhm, saving for a rainy day.

Read the first installment here and weep. Or you can read it and learn.