Abu Dhabi: Fighting corruption tops priorities of the UAE’s political leadership and governmental authorities, especially financial control bodies, a senior offical said on Sunday.
“The UAE has joined the UN Anti-Corrruption Convention to fight graft, cooperate with other countries in every aspect of the fight against it including prevention, investigation and the prosecution of offenders,” the State Audit Bureau’s chairman, Hareb Bin Saeed Al Amimi.
Al Amimi added the UAE has several ant-graft authorities and legislations that convict offenders, “but our ambition far exceeds this and efforts are ongoing to upgrade these legislations as such the country studies anti-graft legislations and systems of advanced countries”.
Al Amimi was speaking during a meeting with UN experts in charge of reviewing the UAE’s conformity with the international ant-graft convention.
The UAE is set to have its first anti-corruption law to become more transparent and end financial malpractices and other offences related to corruption.
Law
The State Audit Bureau will enact the country’s first anti-corruption law as per instruction by President His Highness Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan to fulfill the country’s commitment to UN anti-corruption covention.
The convention requires countries to establish criminal and other offences to cover a wide range of acts of corruption, if these are not already crimes under domestic law. In some cases, States are legally obliged to establish offences; in other cases, in order to take into account differences in domestic law, they are required to consider doing so. The Convention goes beyond previous instruments of this kind, criminalising not only basic forms of corruption.
The team includes experts from signatories of the convention and representatives from the ministries of justice, Foreign Affairs, Interior, Central bank, Dubai Police and public money prosecutions in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
Countries are bound by the convention to render specific forms of mutual legal assistance in gathering and transferring evidence for use in court.
Asset-recovery
Countries also agreed on asset-recovery, which is stated explicitly as a fundamental principle of the convention.
Al Amimi said the UAE law will greatly support the UAE’s efforts to fight corruption and related offences, protect public funds and better utilise national resources for comprehensive development.
The bureau is currently the UAE’s main anti-corruption authority. Created by the late Shaikh Zayed, it has played a major role in safeguarding public funds and curbing financial malpractices.
The bureau has recorded many cases involving misappropriation of federal finds since it was set up in the 1990s and has succeeded in recovering large sums of money wasted by some departments although it had not reported any arrests. But in a recent statement, the Bureau said it had detected more illegal financial operations at federal offices and informed the attorney general about such offences and those involved so they can be prosecuted.
