CORRUPTION-RUSSIA: A Fight Easier Declared Than Won

By Kester Kenn Klomegah Reprint | | Print |

Kester Kenn Klomegah

MOSCOW, Sep 21 2007 (IPS) - A few days after his appointment as new Prime Minister, Viktor Zubkov promised to tackle Russia’s biggest problem: corruption. But analysts have their doubts how far he can succeed given that corruption has permeated from the top to the lowest positions.

“The anti-corruption agenda is appealing to Zubkov, but his experience in running a market economy is weak, and it is doubtful he understands the task involved,” Yevgeny Volk, head of Moscow’s Heritage Foundation, a non-profit social organisation, told IPS.

“It (corruption) has penetrated practically into all sectors of politics and economy, and worse, in utilities and energy sectors and even fishery. Law enforcement agencies dealing with small and medium size business strive for bribes.”

Over-regulation of the economy and red tape provide fertile grounds for corruption, he said.

“It’s difficult to say whether the cabinet will be capable of addressing the issue because battling it requires the creation of effective and trusted institutions or government agencies,” Andrey Prhezdomsky, author of ‘How to Avoid Bribes’ and a member of the Public Chamber’s Commission on Law Reforms and Monitoring Corruption told IPS.

“I think that there is a system failure in cracking down on corrupt officials. People who are guilty of extortion, economic crimes and abuse of office should be severely dealt with by the courts.”

The courts, he said, themselves come under the spotlight when cases of abuse of public office surface. The legal system needs an overhaul to push it towards strictly implementation of the law, he said.

Bureaucratic procedures for both local and foreign investors have made bribery standard practice, Prhezdomsky says.

First deputy prime minister Sergey Ivanov says the high level of corruption is a key obstacle to development.

“Business initiative is obstructed by high barriers to entering the market and unequal conditions for competition,” Ivanov told an economic forum at St. Petersburg. “The monopolisation of local markets hampers the development of small and medium-sized businesses.

“Many sectors of the Russian economy are still closed to competition. The institutions designed to protect property rights function weakly. The efficiency of government regulation in general and the quality of government services in particular is low.”

Prosecutor-general Yury Chaika says criminal business activities and money laundering pose a real threat to socio-economic development. He has urged the government to approve a new anti-corruption programme.

In all 9,500 corruption cases were registered by the prosecutor general’s office last year alone, according to an official source. Transparency International says the real incidence of corruption is far higher.

Last month, a report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) said Russian universities demanded about 520 million dollars in bribes in 2006. Earlier reports have noted that the “shadow budget” of Russian higher educational institutions totals more than 2 billion dollars a year.

Early this year, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree establishing an interdepartmental working group to draft amendments to Russian law in conformity with the UN Convention against Corruption of October 2003 and the Council of Europe Criminal Law Convention on Corruption of January 1999.

“The business climate in the country must be reliably protected from corruption and crimes in the economic sphere. Such crimes corrode society and deliver a powerful blow to the reputation of Russia as a country with a civilised economic environment, if they go unpunished,” he stressed.

Zubkov, who formerly headed the Federal Financial Monitoring Service, has declared he will take up that fight. Addressing parliamentarians after he was overwhelmingly voted in, he ordered the legislative chamber to revive the stalled anti-corruption bill.

“We are preparing a law that will make corruption and abuse of government office punishable by the law courts because corruption has become pervasive, and many officials see it a trivial matter, and because the scale of bribe-taking has reached highly intolerable levels,” parliament deputy and member of the State Duma’s Anti-Corruption Commission Igor Nikolayevich Morozov told IPS.