Zee Beam News

12-12-2005 The Moscow Times - By Stephen Boykewich Staff Writer - A steady increase in corruption and the lack of political will to fight it will present major obstacles as Russia assumes the G8 chair in 2006, Transparency International said Friday. The Berlin-based watchdog released its 2005 World Corruption Barometer on Friday, with results showing Russians increasingly pessimistic about the institutions meant to protect them and increasingly certain corruption will get worse. That's not just bad news for business, it's bad news for President Vladimir Putin as he claims one of the biggest spotlights on the world stage, TI Russia head Yelena Panfilova said Friday. The Kremlin-sponsored bill cracking down on NGOs is likely to exacerbate the problem, she said. The Group of Eight's Forum for the Future agenda, reaffirmed at the Gleneagles summit in July, "has a huge anti-corruption component that has to be fulfilled with the participation of civil society organizations," Panfilova said at a news conference. "How these organizations will be able to carry out that requirement of G8 leadership after these changes, to tell you the truth, I can't imagine." In the new TI survey, conducted by Romir Monitoring, 1,630 Russian citizens named the police, political parties and the parliament as the most corrupt institutions, and NGOs and the church as the least. This makes a government crackdown on NGOs "a logical inconsistency," the TI Russia director said. Sixty-two percent of survey respondents said corruption has increased a little or a lot in the last three years, and 50 percent expected it to grow further over then next three -- a sign pessimism is deepening. In last year's survey, only 38 percent expected corruption to get worse in the near future. TI's World Corruption Barometer tracks personal experiences of corruption, as opposed to the organization's better-known Corruption Perception Index, which ranks countries according to a poll of independent experts. In that poll, Russia dropped to 126th out of 159 this year, its lowest level since 2001. Vladimir Vysenko, a representative of the liberal Republican Party, said corruption was increasing due to the lack of a single high-profile corruption prosecution within the Kremlin leadership over the past five years. "As long as that kind of signal is lacking in our country, people will keep doing what they're doing. People always watch what's happening at the top," Vysenko said, speaking at the conference. "It's curious how Putin will handle himself when he heads the G8. There are going to be quite a few questions put to him, in part about this," Vysenko added. Citizens believe corruption has the greatest influence on political life, with survey respondents putting the degree of influence at 3.4, with 4 being the greatest possible influence. Corruption's influence on business was a close second, at 3.1. The release of the report coincided with UN Anti-Corruption Day, and Panfilova said that officials fed up with consistently grim corruption rankings should push for the ratification of the UN Convention Against Corruption, which Russia signed in 2003 but has yet to ratify.