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IWPR: Abkhazia’s Anti-Corruption Drive

posted by FerrasB on June, 2007 as Abkhazia


From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 6/1/2007 9:38 AM
31-May-07
Abkhazia’s Anti-Corruption Drive

Sacking of city mayor triggers wider government crackdown.

By Inal Khashig in Sukhum (CRS No. 394 31-May-07)
The Abkhazian leader Sergei Bagapsh has broken a longstanding taboo by declaring war on corrupt officials.

Bagapsh, president of the unrecognised republic since 2004, said he intended to fight corruption in the upper echelons of power. In his annual presidential address on May 30, he said that the chief objective of the government will be to tighten control over expenditure of money from the budget.

His public statements follow a scandal which cost the mayor and deputy mayor of the Abkhaz capital Sukhum their jobs.

There is speculation that the crackdown was forced on Bagapsh, who was away from Abkhazia when the scandal broke.

In the almost 15 years since Abkhazia broke away from Georgian rule and became de facto independent, the issue of corruption and the prohibitions contained in the criminal code have become little more than decorative anachronisms left over from Soviet times.

Top officials waved the problem away by proclaiming that there is no corruption in Abkhazia. The official statistics supported this view, as no official was ever put on trial on corruption charges.

Now things are beginning to change. The latest drive began with a routine audit carried out by the housing office of the department that deals with economic crimes, part of the Sukhum mayor’s office.

The conclusions came as a bombshell, with anti-corruption officers reporting that of the 24 million roubles (925,000 US dollars) the city authorities spent on household repairs in 2006, one third of the money was simply stolen.

Some of the theft was very straightforward. For example, official records show that a Sukhum apartment block was given a new roof, which was news to the residents, who have not seen any such structure. In another case, housing officials allocated money to a building that does not even exist.

Other scams were more sophisticated. For instance, someone would be awarded a sum of money in welfare benefits, but would only receive only 10 per cent, the remainder disappearing into a bureaucrat’s pocket.

“The checks showed that in fact, many categories of those on benefits – war invalids, the families of those who died in the war, families with many children - received financial assistance from the mayor’s office,” said a source in the investigation team who asked not to be named. “The level of assistance never exceeded 20,000 roubles [770 dollars]. But at the same time, people who did not fall into these needy categories received sums ten times bigger than that, which naturally aroused our suspicions.”


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