Maldives slips in corruption perception index

The Maldives slipped 15 places on the corruption perception index since last year and continues to rank below Sri Lanka and India in the region, global corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) said in a report released this week.

The Indian Ocean archipelago scored 2.5 on a scale of zero to 10, with zero indicating high levels of corruption and 10 very low. The score is down from 2.8 in 2008 and 3.3 in 2007, signalling worsening levels of perceived corruption.

A TI analysis of the region concluded that major political upheaval in the Maldives and the passage of political reforms over the past year had not been entirely smooth.

Last August, the Maldives ratified a new constitution that established separation of powers and a bill of rights. This was followed by the country’s first-ever multi-party presidential election, which saw incumbent President Mohamed Nasheed unseat Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Asia’s longest-serving ruler.

In its analysis, TI further noted that a number of human rights abuses and corruption cases have been exposed since last year.

In 2008, Gayoom appointed an independent auditor general who has since published over 30 audit reports detailing corruption in state institutions. Now in opposition, Gayoom’s party, the Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party and its coalition partner, People’s Alliance, have rejected the reports and the auditor general as biased.

“It’s a perception of corruption levels so what would have happened is that in 2008 there was a lot of corruption cases that have been unearthed so that means the corruption perception would have increased. There was not necessarily more corruption,” said Thoriq Hamid, project co-ordinator at Transparency Maldives.

Mohamed Zuhair, president’s office press secretary, told Minivan News today that the decline was most likely because the Maldives was experiencing transition.

“If you covered it in other countries where there was regime change, the same statistics would happen mainly because there was been a flurry of activity at the end of the last regime to cover up what had been going on,” he said.

Zuhair added information about corruption has become available for the first time, noting a number of independent institutions which directly or indirectly deal with corruption under the new constitution.

These include the anti-corruption commission, the police integrity commission and the judicial services commission. “All these commissions need to speed up their work and become strengthened,” he said.

Zuhair further pointed to the government’s efforts to document corruption. In May, President Mohamed Nasheed established a commission to investigate the allegations in the auditor general’s reports, whose activities the opposition have called a “witch-hunt”.

The CPI focuses on corruption in the public sector and is prepared using surveys asking questions relating to the misuse of public power for private benefit.

TI gathered data from four sources and covered both 2008 and 2009. The sources were the Asian Development Bank, World Bank, the country risk service and country forecast by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the global risk service by IHS Global Insight.

One of the purposes of the CPI is to offer a the views of businesspeople and experts who make decisions about trade and investment.

Other countries in the Asia-Pacific region that saw a decline in their scores include Malaysia, Nepal and Afghanistan while Bangladesh, Japan, Tonga and Vanuatu saw their scores significantly rise.

Regionally, the Maldives ranks 23 out of 32 countries while globally it ranks 130 out of 180 countries.

According to TI, the global financial crisis and political change in many countries last year revealed defects in financial and political systems as well as failures in policy, regulations, oversight and enforcement mechanism.

As a result, 13 countries saw a drop in their scores from the 32 countries in the region. 

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