The “fighting corruption” fiasco

One of Marouf Bakhit’s famous achievements is taking up the mantle of fighting corruption. In one case, the ex-minister of municipalities and senior ministry officials were questioned on the garbage press case. Basically, when Abdurazzaq Tubeishat was a minister of municipalities, he engineered the merger of adjacent municipalities across the country. In an effort to make this work, garbage collecting equipment was needed. When he tried to get funds for this, he was told that the government couldn’t afford to buy this equipment. So, it was suggested and the decision was made to buy used equipment from Germany. The government could afford that, and so a delegation was formed to go to Germany to get the needed equipment.

After the equipment was delivered, allegations that some of it did not meet the specifications were made by the General Accounting Bureau. Since then, the issue has been raised a number of times. Finally, a parliamentary committee studied the issue. The resulting report concludes that Tubeishat did nothing wrong, and that the issue of the sanitary equipment was handled correctly. Tubeishat is threatening to sue for defamation.

A second front on the war on corruption was on the General Union of Voluntary Societies. The case against GUVS (a scam to collect lottery ticket winnings for unsold tickets) was thrown out of the court yesterday (on a technicality). The other issues still being studied have stalled, also suggesting that the cases are flawed. Time will tell.

During the last parliamentary session, deputy Fawwaz Zoubi asserted that previous governments have given tax breaks to a certain individual worth 45 million dinars. This was also based on a General Accounting Bureau report. After a parliamentary investigation, the committee investigating the issue found that this was not true, and that the tax exemptions were legal and appropriate, and benefited a large number of companies.

Now, the failure of the grand scheme to eradicate corruption gives pause. Does not corruption exist in Jordan? Are the wrong cases focused on, in order to hide real corruption? How useful are General Accounting Bureau reports? It seems that upon follow up, many of their allegations do not add up to real corruption.

Former minister of water, Hazim Nasser, who was dismissed when Adnan Badran took office, says that attempts to collect two million dinars for water consumed by companies in the Disi area were frozen by Badran. Investigations show that Badran is a major shareholder in one of the companies that is supposed to pay. This seems to be well documented. Will this be investigated? Or is the anti-corruption campaign over?