The governmental effort to fight corruption in Moldova is just for show, and the likes of the National Anticorruption Center or the National Integrity Commission were created just to throw dust in the eyes in a bid to deceive the public opinion and Moldova’s development partners into thinking that the anti-corruption effort is for real, thinks the political pundit Igor Botan.
In an interview with RFE/RL’s Moldovan service, Botan noted that despite the work done by these agencies funded with taxpayers’ money, the ‘billion’ had nevertheless been stolen, and Moldova still remains Europe’s most corrupt country.
He further observed that the NIC, just like the other watchdog and law-enforcement agencies, had been politicized from the very beginning. “The Law (founding the NIC) was adopted in December 2011, but took effect in March 2013. The reason why it took them a year and a half to finish the job was because they were looking for the right placemen, because they were seeking to share the seats on that Commission among the groups in Parliament, and all that just to tell us that they don’t have leverage. An absolutely new law, within an anti-corruption framework conceived for a period of five years, and three years later they have the nerve to tell us: you see, we don’t have leverage, we don’t know how this works and things like that”, fumed Igor Botan.
Commenting on the public servants’ income and assets declarations, Igor Botan said: “In fact, the top officials in Moldova had been required to submit such declarations since 2002, with the MPs required to do that publicly in Parliament. And we all know how this committee in charge of collecting and checking the declarations worked: each year on the due date in February they would announce that the assets and revenues of the MPs hadn’t changed a bit.”
According to Igor Botan, little changed with the advent of the National Integrity Commission. “The NIC is not even able to meet the April deadline and submit its annual report so that the people can see what this public institution supported with taxpayers’ money is doing”, concluded Botan.
