Public sector hit by epidemic of bribery
To bribe or not to bribe? Serhii Chernykh, head of the Serious Fraud Division at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, recently told journalists how this problem is being addressed in Ukraine.
Unfortunately, Ukrainian bureaucrats usually give a positive answer to this rhetorical question. In the past six months alone they have received “gratuities” for “services” worth UAH 8.5 million, while the total value of bribes in 2006 was only 9.7 million hryvnias. If things go on like this, by the end of 2007 it will be possible to double last year’s “achievements.” The Ministry of Internal Affairs explains the upward trend by changes in the work of law-enforcement bodies rather than by an increase in corruption or amounts of bribes.
This year law-enforcement agencies have documented about 1,900 bribe-related offenses, with 1,300 cases pending trial. Out of 700 prosecuted officials, 200 work in administrative bodies and about 250 in auditing institutions. Chernykh pointed to the rise in large-scale bribery. This constitutes the greatest proportion in the overall value of bribes.
Among the corrupt officials who have been exposed by law enforcers are a city council deputy chairman in the Crimea, a district administration chairman and chief of the consumers’ rights protection department in Dnipropetrovsk oblast, and a veterinary department chief in Dnipropetrovsk. The list is very long. Both top- and low-level offices are entangled in the web of corruption.
Some managers of state-run businesses also have itchy palms. It is here that bribes flourish on a large scale. In Dnipropetrovsk oblast, a factory manager accepted $235,000 during the signing of a contract on the sale of industrial facilities, which envisioned waiving the right to lease a plot of land. “The chairman of the board of directors of a Donetsk oblast joint-stock company accepted $720,000 for helping to resolve the problem of selling the entire property of a motor transport facility,” Chernykh said.
As for the region-by-region distribution of bribery in Ukraine, Chernykh notes, “I cannot say that bribery is more common in some places than others. On the average, the figures per 100,000 of the population differ from one another by hundredths of a percent.” Still, there is a structural distribution of the most corrupt sectors. According to Ukraine’s chief fraud-busting official, the largest number of recorded crimes, 515, was committed in the budget-funded sector. Next come privatization, fuel and energy facilities, and the agrarian sector.
Chernykh emphasizes that corruption remains rampant in education. It is this sector that is steadily pushing up the numbers of solved bribery-related crimes. The “golden season” is the period when entrance and end-of-term exams are written. “Bribes in educational institutions range from 400 to 100,000 hryvnias,” Chernykh says. A total of 150 criminal cases have been opened in the educational sector this year.
In most cases, natural and artificial persons resort to corruption when they want to assume the rights of others. They are not even deterred by the fact that the Constitution of Ukraine provides a minimum punishment of up to three years’ imprisonment and maximum — fifteen. What is to be done? The interior ministry has only one answer: stick to new practices, use specially designed operative methods, and hope for assistance from average citizens, who, incidentally, are already successfully working through a system of regional hot lines.
The data furnished by the chief of the interior ministry’s Serious Fraud Division seems to be encouraging. But can corruption and bribery be eradicated? Academics answer in the negative, as do most practitioners. Bribery pervades almost every sphere of social life. Thus, the country runs the risk of seeing corruption turn into a mass epidemic that cannot be cured because of lack of both money and doctors.
