Bringing the corrupt to justice
The keynote speaker at the UNESCO- Sri Lanka Press Institute partnered World Press Freedom Day event at the BMICH on May 3 made the important point: Sri Lankans seem to have overnight started making the connection between corruption and the depletion of reserves, the absence of money to pay off foreign loans taken to build those corruption-riddled, cost-inflated roads and other infrastructure.
The emptiness of state coffers has prompted "a tsunami wave of anger and discontent over inflated tenders, commissions – the dressy terms for bribes, vanity projects. Suddenly everyone wants to follow the money," she said.
The day before that, the leader of the JVP dramatically dumped a cartload of files before the media and showcased the rampant corruption documented in recent years. He spared no one in the Government or Opposition hierarchy reinforcing the party's long-held theme that there's no difference between the two when it comes to corruption and that one provides protection to the other despite all the rhetoric and accusations from public platforms to hoodwink the voters.
This week an Australian broadcaster aired sordid details of corruption in that Anglosphere with part of the programme devoted to a corrupt deal in Sri Lanka. These revelations are nothing really new if one kept a keen eye on what has appeared in the media all these years, only to be relegated to the limbo of forgotten things. Nobody really cared, and nobody dared to bring any finality to the many bogus investigations that were carried out.
Feeble attempts through Presidential Commissions of Inquiry were merely to defuse public demands momentarily. The reports and recommendations were relegated to the cupboards of the Presidential Secretariat gathering dust, a waste of time, money and paper. The Bribery and Corruption Commission has been a wicked joke played on the country by the politicians. The perpetrators only needed to duck for cover from passing storms.
The Organisation of Professional Associations ( OPA), the Bar Association ( BASL) and the Institute of Chartered Accountants ( ICASL) have to come forward, as they have right now on legal and constitutional reforms, to sift through for verifiable evidence already in the public domain and bring at least some of the well- known crooks to book. Professionals and ordinary citizens need not wait for Godot.
There is a precedent. Former President Chandrika Kumaratunga was brought to justice by two ordinary law abiding citizens for corrupt practices in the Waters Edge case ( the local Watergate), and fined by the Supreme Court no less, for inter- alia, violating the Doctrine of Public Trust. There was no Police or Attorney General, or Presidential Commissions involved in the case, just two ordinary citizens. It remains the only case of an Executive President and Head of Government so far to have been dragged to court, found guilty, and fined for corruption.