Donor nations ask Vietnam to crack down on corruption

May 29, 2009, 17:45 GMT

Hanoi - Vietnam has reformed its corruption laws, but has made few concrete moves to crack down on offenders via the legal system or the media, foreign diplomats told Vietnamese officials Friday.

Ambassadors and representatives of international aid organizations told Vietnamese government inspectors at a semi-annual dialogue on corruption that ending widespread malfeasance would require transparency, contracting reform, and greater freedom for journalists and civil society groups to denounce violators.

There needs to be a 'strong emphasis on enforcement' of existing anti-corruption law, and on 'the role of civil society, the media and the public,' Swedish Ambassador Rolf Bergman told the gathering.

'In the current context of Vietnam, anti-corruption measures are still not very effective,' acknowledged Vietnamese anti-corruption officer Le Van Lan.

International concern over corruption in Vietnam has sharpened since two Vietnamese journalists who reported the notorious PMU-18 corruption case in the Ministry of Transportation were arrested in May, 2008.

In December, Japan halted all development assistance to Vietnam for several months over the so-called PCI affair. Consultants from a Japanese company, Pacific Consultants International, said they had paid the head of Ho Chi Minh City's Transportation Department some 800 thousand dollars in kickbacks on a highway construction project.

The dialogue Friday focused on the corruption-prone construction industry. Vietnamese officials detailed a host of problems in the sector.

Pham Van Khanh, a director in the Government Inspectorate, said inspections from 2005-7 had found 28 cases in which contractors were paid for nonexistent work, or had double-charged for work they had done. He said the amount lost totaled nearly 100 million dollars, of which the government had recovered just under half.

Khanh and other officials said construction projects are often awarded to large companies that submit unrealistic bids, then subdivide the work among smaller companies that lack the capacity to carry out the job effectively.

The World Bank and Vietnamese officials focused on administrative measures, such as making project data publicly available and paying civil servants higher salaries to ensure they do not resort to extortion. The Vietnamese presented a host of decrees and regulations adopted in recent years to harmonize anti-corruption laws.

But Danish Ambassador Peter Hansen presented a study showing that articles on corruption in the Vietnamese media, which crested around the PMU-18 affair in early 2007, had since dropped to almost nothing as journalists who reported on the case were punished.

'Clearly the press lost their confidence after the PMU-18 case,' Hansen told the German Press Agency dpa. 'So now you have to build up their confidence to be able to report without any sanctions. But I think the government at least to some degree realizes that the press has an important role to play.'

Every Western ambassador at the meeting, as well as the representatives of the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, called for more room for civil society groups to join in fighting corruption.

Vietnamese Vice Minister of Planning and Investment Cao Viet Sinh said he agreed that 'the participation of society is important to monitoring.' But Sinh listed 'social organizations like the Fatherland Front, the Women's Union, the Farmers' Association and the Veterans' Association' as the kind of groups that might play such a role.

These groups are known in Vietnam as 'mass organizations', and are tightly controlled by the Communist Party. Sinh did not mention any small or independent non-governmental organizations.

'The understanding of civil society organizations or NGOs (in Vietnam) is very limited,' said Ran Liao of Transparency International, who spoke at the meeting. Liao said it would take time for Vietnamese officials to appreciate the value of independent civil society groups.