Fresh indictments suggest government is getting tough on corruption

The Amman prosecutor general recently indicted 350 people on charges of corruption, a senior interior ministry official said on Monday. “Abuse of public and private posts has wrought havoc on our economy and development,” said the official, preferring anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. “We need to send a message that Jordan is a safe country for foreign investors. We can only do that by cracking down on corruption.” The official went on to point out that, of the 350 indictments, at least 300 were handed out to members of the private sector. While he was unwilling to disclose the precise amounts of money involved in the cases, he conceded that some involved amounts in the millions of dollars. “Some cases involve hundreds or thousand of dollars, but others are in the tens of millions,” he said. Since assuming the throne almost nine years ago, King Abdullah has given priority to stimulating the sluggish economy and bringing financial and administrative corruption to heel. “The king has been directly spearheading measures designed to eliminate hurdles facing potential investors, mainly corruption and bloated bureaucracy,” said a senior official from the government-run Anti-Corruption Department. Last year, the king requested parliament to put anti-corruption legislation on the fast track in order to have it passed as quickly as possible. This July, the national assembly is scheduled to discuss a number of anti-corruption draft laws, including a financial disclosure law and a money-laundering law, as well as others. Some parliamentarians and economists remain sceptical, however. “We have thousands of high-profile corruption cases, but they’re covered up by the government and influential personalities,” said MP Abdul Rahim Malhas, who accused successive governments of “lacking serious motivation” for fighting corruption. “The past four governments used all kinds of rhetoric to announce their ‘wars on corruption’, but we later discovered that top officials from the same governments were themselves corrupt.” In a 2005 report by corruption watchdog Transparency International, Jordan ranked 37th out of 145 countries in the world in terms of official corruption levels. The report ranked Jordan fourth in the Arab world, after Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. The organisation defines corruption as “the abuse of public office for private gain”, and measures the degree to which corruption exists among a given country's politicians and public officials. According to figures from the World Bank, Arab national economies lose an estimated US $40 billion a year to corruption. MBH/AR/AM