Corruption: Open season for next two years

Bribery and corruption are now the second-most significant unlawful activity generating criminal proceeds in the country, states the National Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Risk Assessment (NRA) of Sri Lanka released last week by the Central Bank’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU).

This is an alarming, though not entirely surprising development. Bribery, corruption and money laundering are predicate offences indicative of a deeper web of crime. With more actors— including those with the power and authority to act now “in the game”, this scourge has become much harder to stamp out.

Sri Lanka has a global reputation for being corrupt, with investors complaining for years about an uneven playing field, rigged bids and the unwritten rule that you need a political fixer “to get anything done”.

The NRA was part of a compulsory requirement of the inter-governmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the international anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing standard setters. As recently as 2018, FATF listed Sri Lanka among eleven “high-risk and monitored jurisdictions” that had taken insufficient measures to combat money laundering, terrorist financing and other threats to the international financial system. It was only taken off the FATF’s “Grey List” in October 2019.

Domestically, there’s a marked lack of embarrassment. And if there is any action being taken on the anti-corruption front—on paper, at least—it’s because the exacting IMF programme that Sri Lanka has signed up to demands anti-corruption measures as part of its restructuring template. But without the political will to implement the laws, any promise of progress is eyewash.

President Ranil Wickremesinghe was quoted this week as telling the chief USAID Administrator on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) summit, that it will take two years to adopt the new Anti-Corruption Act as the Anti-Corruption Commission it set up was grappling to recruit trained staff.

During his tenure as Prime Minister in the 'good governance' administration, significant sums of foreign aid were poured into the anti-corruption and investigative machinery that the Government set up. Scores of investigations were initiated and some progressed remarkably well owing to a group of policemen who lapped up training and put their new skills to good use. Cases such as the probe into the Airbus bribe, the Krrish deal and many more were taken forward diligently, conscientiously and methodically, despite escalating pressure from higher-ups (both political and within the Financial Crimes Investigation Division and Police Department).

After the Government changed, these trained investigators were dispatched to the wilderness, transferred out of their areas of expertise for obvious reasons and assigned menial tasks. No number of new laws will solve this perennial, entrenched problem when even the existing ones are not implemented for lack of political will.

With the IMF cracking its whip, Sri Lanka might inch forward on its promised anti-corruption agenda “for show”. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Digitalisation programmes launched with grand fanfare fail—the National Medicines Regulatory Authority, the Inland Revenue Department and the Department of Immigration and Emigration are cases in point because computerisation processes will destroy the bribery ecosystem that thrives in plain view. The Bribery and Corruption Commission has been nothing but a 'paper tiger'. Even the Police, themselves living off payoffs, have proved useless (with the good ones being transferred out the moment they get too close to netting the whales).

To pretend that new laws will change this scenario is, arguably, a misrepresentation of proven fact.