Cambodia has improved slightly in the realm of corruption compared with
the previous year, the head of the country’s Transparency International office
said yesterday.
The emphasis, it seems, is on the
word slightly.
Announcing the new rankings of
The Corruption Perception Index, which weighs independent research to judge
countries on the level of perceived corruption in the public sector,
Transparency International Cambodia director Preap Kol said Cambodia scored a 22
out of a possible 100, putting it at 157 out of a total of 176 countries.
The “highly corrupt” countries of
Cambodia and Myanmar received some of the lowest grades compared with the “very
clean” Denmark, Finland and New Zealand at the other end the spectrum.
Placed in the last few slots were
Afghanistan, North Korea and Somalia.
Still, the figure for Cambodia is
a tiny bump from last year, when it received a score of 19 and a ranking of
165.
To measure the improvement purely
in terms of an Asia-Pacific list, Cambodia is now perceived to be less corrupt
than Laos, but more corrupt than Papau New Guinea, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Preap said that while the
Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU) has made several important arrests, the fight
against public graft should be fought on several fronts.
He urged the government to pass
the Law of Access to Information, so the public procurement and budgeting
process is brought out into the open, and to increase general awareness of the
relatively new Anti-Corruption Law.
As for the ACU, Preap recommended
that it strengthen its investigative resources, because it isn’t dealing with
“ordinary crime”.
Ek Tha, a spokesman for the
Council of Ministers, dismissed the continued low standing that Transparency
International bestows on Cambodia, and bristled at being placed behind some of
the countries on the list.
“Transparency International
should have changed their view towards Cambodia, because Cambodia today is the
new Cambodia on the old land,” he said.
“That is why donors have
continued to provide their overseas development assistance, more and more,
because they have realised and they have sensed that the Cambodian government
has been moving on the right track.”
As is the ACU, said Preap, though
he added that the assistance isn’t enough.
“The ACU has done some remarkable
work… They are moving down a positive path,” Preap said. However, “we would
like to see more from them.”
But the ACU has been taking
steps. In the past several months, it has been through a flurry of training,
largely due to a five-year agreement between the unit and the Phnom Penh-based
Samreth Law Group.
According to Ly Ping, an attorney
with the law firm, a workshop on “Understanding Land Law” was held for about 70
ACU officials in October. Earlier, in June, Samreth Law Group organised a
training session on “Disseminating Anti-Corruption Law” for 100 lawyers in the
Cambodian Bar Association.
Since the inception of the ACU in
2010, only four arrests have been made. The first official brought in was
anti-drug czar Moek Dara, who was convicted last year on several counts of
bribery and corruption.
In a recent statement, ACU chief
Om Yentieng, who declined to comment for this article, said the ACU had fielded
hundreds of complaints, many of them credible enough for investigation.
Last month, the ACU followed
through on a long investigation by arresting two officials, Preah Vihear deputy
prosecutor Thol Kem Hong, and provincial taxation office boss Chea Sophal.
The tax officer is accused of
embezzling payments intended for government coffers, and leaving tax forms
unstamped, while Yentieng said that more than 800 complaints had been filed
against the prosecutor.
But it’s not just the ACU’s
investigative arm that is in need of resources, Preap said. He pointed out that
an anti-corruption law has been on the books for two years, but “not many
people are aware of it or how it impacts their lives”.
Since its official launch in
2010, the Cambodian chapter of the Transparency International, a worldwide
organisation that monitors public graft, has been conspicuously absent from
anti-corruption initiatives. That’s starting to change.
The group announced last month
that it is set to launch a $2.5 million three-year program to monitor and
record corruption.
Part of that is a project to
publish all the fees for various public institutions, so Cambodians who are subjected
to illegal fines won’t pay an unnecessary tax. Preap said that the list could
be ready for distribution by January.
The hope is that it will
alleviate the burden of bogus fees on the poor, and also ensure that someone
isn’t breaking the law without knowing it.
“The people who pay over for fees
are also subject to punishment,” he said.
Joe Freeman and Vong Sokheng
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