Political kleptocrats

Political kleptocrats

How great are the rewards of public office? According to a new
list of political kleptocrats of the past two decades, the former
Indonesian president Soeharto supplemented his modest official
salary with kickbacks worth about US$1 billion ($1.3 billion) a
year. Soeharto's top billing in the global corruption survey,
however, is unsurprising given the length, and brutal nature, of
his tenure. Thirty-one years of absolute power in a resource-
rich, populous and rapidly industrializing nation, backed by the
persuasive force of the military, is about as good as it gets for
dictators bent on personal enrichment. Runner-up, the former
Philippine president, Ferdinand Marcos, used much the same model
with more modest results, creaming off an estimated $5 billion to
$10 billion over 14 years, compared with Soeharto's likely tally
of $35 billion.

What is especially disturbing, however, is that four of the
world's top 10 political embezzlers were elected to office. The
mechanisms of accountability built into the democratic system
either failed or were triggered too late.

The Philippines had two entrants in the top 10, published by a
Berlin-based global corruption watchdog, Transparency
International (TI): Marcos and the elected president, Joseph
Estrada, who skimmed off about $80 million in 30 months before
his impeachment in 2001. Filipinos have been struggling with the
Marcos legacy since his ousting in 1986.

The TI 2004 report also highlights another set of problems
affecting many mature democracies. In 89 percent of democracies
surveyed, legal political donations were found to have a
"moderate to high" impact on government policy. TI also found
both public and private companies from wealthy OECD nations were
willing to use middle men to circumvent anticorruption laws,
especially in the globalized industries, with the largest
kickbacks in oil, gas and arms. Soeharto, for example, amassed
much of his wealth because so many were prepared to pay for
preferential access to his nation's resources. This very
disappointing reality means many Western companies are an
integral part of the global corruption web.

-- The Sydney Morning Herald.