Source: Danas
“The economy and society as a whole are faced with huge problems relating to corruption." The percentage of economic operators forced into corruption is very high, and so is the percentage of those that sustained substantial damage or were ruined because they refused it. Corruption can be found everywhere, especially in the health system, the judiciary and executive authorities. Its scale is such that it can be countered only by continual and coordinated cooperation of all authorities and bodies with relevant competences.” I have taken the above statements from a report produced at a large anti-corruption meeting held recently in Zagreb, attended by all anti-corruption authorities and bodies of Croatia. One of the points raised at this meeting was that, because of corruption, their national economy lost $ 1.3 billion every year. I found the report from the above meeting very interesting, primarily because its findings strongly resembled our situation and were very similar to what is often heard in our country. And, of course, because they seemed to beg the question - how much damage has corruption caused in our country? Estimation of the amount of such damage in Serbia by using, for example, the Croatian parameter could be an interesting logical experiment. Not so much because it would yield an amount that would be at least approximately accurate, but because it would invariably remind us of some things that are, quite inadmissibly, often disregarded. It is a logical assumption that, considering any two countries, the one whose level of corruption impartial observers perceive as higher, the one which is larger and has more inhabitants and a higher domestic product, certainly must, at least in absolute terms, sustain much higher damage. That is, of course, unless it expediently establishes and develops strong anti-corruption mechanisms. As regards the position and ranking in the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), in this globally authoritative index which ranks almost all countries in the world by rating their respective levels of corruption on a scale from 0 to 10, Serbia was tied for positions 83-87, with the rating of 3.4 at the end of 2007. To understand what the rating of 3.4 really means, several things should be taken into account. Serbia appeared in the CPI for the first time in 2000, with the disastrous rating of 1.3. The next time it was ranked in 2003 with the rating of 2.3 and in the following three years the rating improved to 2.7, 2.8 and 3.0 respectively. For 2007, we received the abovementioned rating of 3.4. Some tend to play down this latest “advancement” by claiming it resulted from the fact that the rating does not include the territory of Kosovo and that Montenegro was also treated separately for the first time, reminding that both of these subjects had more serious corruption-related problems than Serbia. But, be that as it may, this rating has an undisputable value as the highest rating we have been given so far and the mark that has ranked us the highest to date. We should, of course, keep in mind that this rating remains very low, far away from the not particularly enviable 4.1 given to Croatia and further still from 5.0, which is considered to be the benchmark for an acceptable rating. Fact is that our country has much more inhabitants than Croatia. Statistics show that Serbia has about ten million inhabitants, or over seven and a half million without Kosovo and Metohia, which is in any case much more than approximately four and a half million inhabitants in Croatia. Thus, although our neighbours have much higher per capita GDP, Serbia's total GDP is at least ten billion dollars higher than theirs. As regards our anti-corruption authorities and bodies, the public is pretty much aware of the fact that they all work in “inadequate conditions”. But the public is less aware of what this really means. I have no intention to, and I think there is no need to, dwell on the specific situation of each body from the pretty long list, at least on paper, of various bodies which, in the preventive or repressive sphere of anti-corruption action, play less important or more important roles. I believe it will be sufficient to outline a few facts indicative of the operating conditions of two very important anti-corruption bodies - the Public Procurement Administration and the State Audit Institution. The former uses premises which might be called disastrous without risk of exaggeration. The latter “operates” with no conditions at all. The forty employees of the Public Procurement Administration, including officers of the Commission on Protection of Bidders' Rights in Public Procurement, work in the space of 160 square meters. And the State Audit Institution does not even have that - it has no premises it could call its own. It would be useful to compare these (lacking) conditions with the conditions in which some other public authorities operate, notably those authorities whose raison d'etre is at times difficult to grasp or authorities that have been quite small until recently, only to see their structures hypertrophying lately, especially in terms of officials of various ranking they all employ. The fact that officials of executive authorities, whose duty is to provide conditions for smooth operation of bodies which are already saving or could save us additional hundreds of millions of euros, tolerate this situation not for months, but for years, is beyond common sense. There are at least two good reasons which not only speak, but indeed “scream” against such treatment. Because of the damage, however high it may be, and no less because of the associated embarrassment, it is high time this was changed. The author is the Commissioner for Information
