DESPITE A pledge by President Dmitry Medvedev on election that combating corruption would be his top priority, Russians are still paying bribes amounting to €200 billion a year, equivalent to almost a quarter of Gross Domestic Product.
Police uncovered 35,000 cases of corruption in the first nine months of 2010, including alleged crimes by four deputy governors and five regional ministers – testimony to both an impressive effort and to the scale of a problem that afflicts every citizen in transactions from dodging parking fines to greasing the wheels of planning or procurement. The average bribe increased on the year 1.5 times to about €1,000, the interior ministry reports.
The startling figures come in the same week the international NGO Transparency International (TI) reported that the country has fallen from 146th place to 154th on its Corruption Perceptions Index. It is by far, on this account, the worst perceived major economy and Group of 20 member, seriously damaging the country’s reputation as a place to do business or invest, let alone sign up shortly to the World Trade Organisation – a third of those interviewed by TI for its 2009 survey reported having paid a bribe in the last year.
Polls show the Russian public regards the issue as the major failure of the last 10 years of the leadership of ex-president Vladimir Putin. Mr Medvedev launched a “Forward Russia” anti-graft campaign last October but by July acknowledged that it had achieved nothing. It is a failure that Yelena Panfilova, director of the Moscow TI, attributes to a continuing sense of impunity in higher levels of government. There is no shortage of laws, instructions, orders, or publications against corruption, she says, “but they dont work”. The president has yet more to do to convince his own entourage he is serious.
The TI corruption index rated Ireland unchanged at 14th least corrupt of 178 countries surveyed, although it came with a caveat from the group’s Irish representative suggesting it might not capture the full scale of the role of money in politics here. Publication coincided with the charging of four Dublin politicians with allegedly corruptly undermining the planning system.
Those perceived to be the world’s least corrupt were Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore; Somalia and Burma were named as the most corrupt. The group’s research, regrettably, shows “little or no enforcement” of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s anti-bribery convention among as many as 20 of 36 advanced countries that signed the agreement.