ACC not free of political influence: TIB

Transparency International Bangladesh on Tuesday said that the Anti-Corruption Commission was enjoying independence on paper only as its activities were inhibited by government desire.

When announcing the outcome of a follow-up study on Bangladesh Anti-Corruption Commission 2018, TIB executive director Iftekharuzzaman said that the commission was not free of political influence and it failed to act neutrally when dealing with corruption.

The TIB presented its research on ACC titled ‘Strengthening Anti-graft Organisation’ at its Dhanmondi office.

TIB executive director said that the commission had been playing a biased role and it was not an organisation that took equal measures against all.

‘We have hardly seen ACC making significant progress with big cases like that of the BASIC bank. In order to keep its dignity intact, it must make the recruitments of chairman and commissioners more transparent,’ he suggested.

While reading out the research findings, TIB programme manager Shammi Laila Islam said that people have negative perception about how the commission was conducting investigations into multiple allegations of similar

magnitude.

She said that even the commission officials had said that people lacked confidence in them.

She said that people believed that the commission gave importance to petty corruption allegations while there was no visible success in tackling major corruption cases.

‘There is concern over ACC officials’ skills and professionalism as well,’ she said.

The findings said that the commission usually failed to complete most of investigations in time and there are also allegations that ACC officials took bribe.

‘The investigations carried out by the ACC were below standard and as a result, the rate of success compared to the number of cases filed with the graft watchdog was unsatisfactory,’ the report further claimed.

According to the findings, the overall score secured by ACC in this assessment is 60 per cent, which falls in the ’moderate’ category.

‘It is noteworthy that ACC’s overall score falls short of seven points from the high category, which indicates that the institution needs to improve by only a few indicators in order to graduate to the high category,’ it said.

Among the 50 indicators the commission scored ‘high’ in 21 indicators, ‘moderate’ in 18 and ‘low’ in 11 indicators, it said.

The highest score was achieved in ‘Prevention, Education and Outreach’ (75 per cent), followed by ‘Independence and Status’ (67 per cent) and ‘Cooperation and External Relations’ (67 per cent). The lowest score achieved in ‘Detection, Investigation and Prosecution’ (44 per cent).

TIB recommended amendment of ACC Act 2004, Money Laundering Prevention Act 2012 and Sarkari Chakri Ain 2018 for the empowerment of the national anti-graft watchdog.

When asked for reaction about the findings of TIB report, ACC director for public relations Pranab Kumar Bhattacharjee told New Age that it will make comment about the TIB findings after going through its findings.

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net