Kuwaitis urged to fight corruption

Corruption is a monster that is gradually draining Kuwait's financial resources into private pockets and hampering the development of the country. It is time that all Kuwaitis fight this menace, said the chief of the anti-corruption committee of the National Assembly on Thursday.

Commenting on the Transparency International's (TI) report of an increase in perceived corruption in Kuwait in the last three years, MP Nasser Al Sane who is also the vice chairman of Global Organisation of Parliamentarians Against Corruption talking to Gulf news, said, "I feel pain to say that the report is true and it just shows that we are regressing as a society instead of progressing towards transparency in our dealings."

"The organisation which is based in Canada is a sister organisation to TI and hopes to establish an Arab Chapter on November 18 to actually fight corruption at an institutional level", Al Sane said.

Kuwait ranks 44th in the 2004 TI Corruption Perceptions Index with a CPI score of 4.8.

The CPI score relates to the perceptions of the degree of corruption as seen by business people and country analysts and ranges between 10 (highly clean) and 0 (highly corrupt).

The CPI focuses on corruption in the public sector and defines it as the abuse of public office for private gains with a focus on bribe taking by public officials in public procurement.

The sources do not distinguish between administrative and political corruption or petty and grand corruption.

Kuwait's parliament is also probing allegations in a multi-million dollar deal to supply fuel to the US military in Iraq in the now infamous Halliburton case which is still unresolved and due to be discussed again when parliament reopens on October 26.

Energy Minister Shaikh Ahmad Fahd Al Sabah has consistently denied that Kuwait was involved in suspect contract irregularities and has reiterated that public funds were not misused in the deal.

The deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars is between the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) and private firm Al Tanmia and Halliburton subsidiary Kellog Brown and Root (KBR).

A draft US Audit disclosed that the US Government was overcharged by some $61 million.

The request for a committee of MPs determined to get at the bottom of the issue also charged that Al Tanmia had been making profits of $840,000 a day from overcharging KBR thus endangering Kuwait's special ties with the US.

In May 2004, Kuwaiti lawmakers unanimously approved the stiffening of anti-corruption laws allowing judicial authorities to accelerate the trials of officials involved in it.

"The Vitamin 'W' network or the network of wasta (influence) also crushes qualified people and leaves them behind", Al Sane said.

"There is rampant corruption everywhere …. In employment where government jobs are given to people with influence, at the interior ministry driving licence office, in education and in business … these cases are all known and all covered by the Kuwaiti media and it is quite disturbing," Al Sane added.