KUALA LUMPUR: In the face of Malaysia’s slight decline in the Corruption Perceptions Index 2010 to 4.4 from 4.5 last year, Transparency International Malaysia (TI Malaysia) has urged the government to show strong political will without fear or favour to fight corruption.

“If Malaysia is going to become a high income nation through the NEM (New Economic Model), we have to take note that there is a direct correlation between the level of corruption and per capita income,” its president, Datuk Paul Low said.

Speaking at the announcement of the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index 2010 today, he warned that corruption will cost the country economically and in time.

He said that increasing the personal income of individuals was good but it would not help to grow the country’s economy if there were no integrity.

“We need to have a clean environment before we reach a high level of income, not the other way around,” he said.

Malaysia remained at the 56th rank out of 178 countries surveyed in TI’s CPI 2010 with a slight decline in the CPI score from 4.5 last year to 4.4.

Low said that the 0.1 decline was “not significant” statistically and Malaysia has “more or less remained” at the same position.

The annual index gives a score from 0 (very corrupt) to 10 (very clean) based on the perceptions of business people and country analysts from within and outside the countries surveyed, and is frequently used by investors as a rough guide to gauge the corruption level of a country.

Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore were perceived to be the cleanest while Afghanistan, Myanmar and Somalia were thought to be the most corrupt.

TI Malaysia cited two main reasons for Malaysia’s score, namely the perception that little progress was made to fight corruption and the lack of political will to implement anti-corruption laws.

These two points were evidenced from the fact that no “big fish” has being brought to book so far, poor progress in the Teoh Beng Hock case and Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ) fiasco, and that no further action was undertaken by the Attorney-General in the “Lingam tapes” case.

Among Asean countries, Indonesia improved significantly. Low said this was due to its president’s political will and the effectiveness of its Corruption Eradication Commission (an equivalent to the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, MACC) which has had 100% success rate of prosecution.

MACC has only a 68% success rate.

The biggest issue for Malaysia, Low said, was “grand corruption” such as in issues relating to mega project procurements, political financing sources, lack of accountability and lack of independence to the Elections Commission.

The highest CPI Malaysia has received was 5.1 in the years 2005, 2007 and 2008. The CPI and country ranking dropped by a significant 0.6 point and nine places respectively last year in the midst of several high profile cases such as the PKFZ fiasco and the Teoh Beng Hock case.

The government under Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak has aimed to improve the score from 4.5 to 4.9 under the anti-corruption National Key Result Area (NKRA).

It has taken steps to achieve this goal. To date, the government has passed the Whistleblowers Act and is in the process of forming 18 special corruption courts and making amends to the Criminal Procedure Code to expedite corruption trials. In addition, government contract tender awards are published in the MyProcurement portal.

“The NKRA efforts by Pemandu started in April (and) to be fair up to now we don’t see the results. Perception takes a while to change. It takes not four months, six months or even a year to change because perception is based on past experiences,” said Low.

As the scores are based on data collected over two years, TI Malaysia secretary-general Ngooi Chiu-Ing said the anti-corruption measures under Najib’s office will take an average of two years to be reflected in the index.

TI Malaysia urged the government to make MACC more independent and autonomous, reform political financing and regulation of political parties and elections, promote freedom of information and enforce existing laws effectively to curb corruption.

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