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Is Malaysia heading for the worst Transparency International Corruption Perception Index ranking and score in 15 years?

Lim Kit Siang

Is Malaysia heading for the worst Transparency International (TI) Corruption Perception Index (CPI) ranking and score in 15 years, when the TI CPI 2009 is released next month?

When launching the country report in the TI Global Corruption Report (GCR) 2009 yesterday, Transparency International Malaysia president Datuk Paul Low said the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) and other “reforms” introduced by the government have so far been ineffective in fighting corruption.

These measures have not produced the desired results and so the public perception of corruption remains unchanged.

Pointing out that Malaysians are fed up with the status quo and the unbearable effects of corruption in the country, Low said the Global Corruption Barometer 2009 surveyed released in May showed that 70 per cent of Malaysians believe that the government is ineffective in fighting corruption.

In contrast, although Indonesia has a far worse position in the corruption perception index than Malaysia, 76% of its people believe their government is effective in fighting corruption.

The public perception position for Malaysia is likely to be even worse than the Global Corruption Barometer 2009 survey in May after two further developments:

• the mysterious death of DAP political aide Teoh Beng Hock on July 16, who went to the 14th floor MACC headquarters as a healthy, vigorous, idealistic young man to give his co-operation as a witness but ended up as a corpse on the 5th floor of the building; and

• the MACC role as Umno catspaw to declare war on Pakatan Rakyat instead of declaring war on corruption, going all out to harass Pakatan Rakyat over alleged constituency allocation improprieties involving RM2,400 (even costing a human life) while being totally blind to corruption and abuses of power against Barisan Nasional leaders running into tens or hundreds of millions or even billions of ringgit!

Transparency International will be releasing its CPI 2009 report next month, which will be the 15th in its annual series since 1995 in the ranking of countries based on their perceived levels of corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys.

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