During a long period of time, the Republic of Moldova has gone through a series of extraordinary crises and turbulence given the gravity of each of the experienced events and their overlapping that resulted in negative consequences for a lot of people. The most relevant examples are evident: the energy crisis, rise in prices and tariffs, regional security crisis, sanitary crisis. All of them occurred simultaneously. These crises seriously affected society, in general, the political class and the government and the opposition, in particular. It happens amid serious system problems, one of them being corruption that penetrated the whole social and political organism of Moldovan society. The experts invited to IPN’s public debate centering on these issues discussed possible solutions and prospects.
Igor Boțan, the standing expert of IPN News Agency’s project, said the phenomenon of corruption is an active or passive abuse by senior state officials and civil servants, which is committed in order to gain personal or group advantages. Corruption is, regrettably, an antisocial act that is frequently met in Moldovan society. “It is a very serious phenomenon because it affects the collective interests through the appropriation and utilization of public resources, occupying of posts, concluding of illegal transactions, etc. For its part, anticorruption is the set of measures promoted to ensure efficient cooperation between the public sector, the private sector and civil society so as to identify the corruptible factors that hamper the normal development of society,” explained the expert.
According to him, the Republic of Moldova has a relatively well developed anticorruption legal framework, but the big problem resides in its implementation. “There are state bodies specialized in the fight against corruption, but such public institutions as the Presidential Office, the Government and Parliament also have very important duties related to the fight against corruption,” said the expert, noting the fight against corruption covers also political corruption that is often witnessed in the electoral process and in party switching, and the prevention of the legalization of ill-gotten gains and unjustified property, etc.
Adrian Lebedinschi, MP of the Bloc of Communists and Socialists, said corruption persists among state functionaries and not necessarily among those who are politically affiliated. “Most of the functionaries pass from government to government and hold the same posts and change their attitude only. In such conditions, we should not draw a parallel between corruption and political parties, but with the person who holds the post,” he stated.
A noteworthy aspect is also the way in which the person who holds a particular post organizes the team around himself/herself. “If a functionary takes bribe, not only he/she does this. It is a whole circle. Regrettably, the investigation bodies, when they identify a case, they identify a person who takes bribe. The other persons for whom bribe is passed on for solving particular problems remain unidentified. I don’t think there is a connection between parties and what we call corruption in general,” stated Adrian Lebedinschi.
Ștefan Gligor, president of the Party of Change, noted the phenomenon of corruption affects the work of state officials, either they are elected or appointed, while the members of society fuel acts of corruption. These citizens aim to solve their problems. If the bureaucratic administrative system does not work, they try to solve the problems by corruption. There is petty corruption that persists at the level of teachers, drivers, etc. There is also grand corruption that involves officials of the Government, Parliament, mayor’s offices, local councils, etc. and systemic corruption.
“Systemic corruption is the state in which most of the decision-making processes take place based on corruption. Groups of influence are formed and these create monopolies and, in order to protect these monopolies, ministers, prime ministers, anticorruption chiefs, managers of different levels of the investigation bodies, prosecution bodies, primarily the specialized prosecutor’s offices that should fight systemic corruption and grand corruption are “bought”,” stated Ștefan Gligor. According to him, in the Republic of Moldova there was a personage who transformed the whole country on the vertical and horizontal of the power, from local elected officials up to the prime minister, into a criminal organization. The difficulty of the problem today resides in the cleaning of this system and its reorganization in a drastic, not cosmetic way, as it is done at present.
Ana Calinici, MP of the Party of Action and Solidarity, said the fight against corruption is not only a local, but also a regional problem, a problem of state security. It goes to the obtaining of personal benefits from the post held by a person. This remains a major problem in the Republic of Moldova. “We deprived the oligarchic forces that managed the country of access to the country’s resources, but this does not mean that these persons disappeared as the system still exists and we only started to do away with it,” she explained.
“Corruption was systemic. It was a way of governing. We realize that we cannot yet fully root it out. It will exist at lower levels. But our goal is to eradicate grand corruption. This should be eliminated and the state institutions should work in favor of the citizens, the public interest, the wellbeing of society, while their efforts should not be concentrated on the interests of a narrow group of people,” stated Ana Calinici. She said the goal of the government is to clear the system of corruption and to also strengthen the institutions so that they become efficient, have the necessary instruments and independence. This way, the reforms will be sustainable and will resist in any context, no matter who is in power.
The public debate titled “Corruption fighting in the Republic Moldova: between objectives, processes and effects” is the 224th installment of the project “Developing Political Culture through Public Debates” that is implemented with support from the Hanns Seidel Foundation.
