CORRUPTION IN VIETNAM: MINISTER FALLS, PARTY GETS

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 04 HANOI 000771 SIPDIS SENSITIVE SIPDIS E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: PGOV KCOR VM SUBJECT: CORRUPTION IN VIETNAM: MINISTER FALLS, PARTY GETS SERIOUS Ref: A) HCMC 320; B) Hanoi 30; C) Hanoi 628; D) 05 Hanoi 3043 HANOI 00000771 001.2 OF 004 ¶1. (SBU) Summary: The media is gleefully reporting a sensational corruption scandal involving millions of dollars in graft that has cost the Minister of Transportation his job. The case amplifies the recent wave of calls for anti- corruption reform that has dominated recent public discussion of the upcoming National Communist Party Congress' political platform, and exacerbated the Party's concerns that corruption is undermining the Party's and the Government's legitimacy. Recent anti-corruption measures include the passage of a new law on corruption, the establishment of two new anti-corruption authorities and, most strikingly for us, the semi-public release of an internal CPV report on corruption that documents the fact that more than half of Vietnamese citizens pay bribes, and nearly half of all civil servants admit to taking them. The Party and the leadership are under pressure to deal with corruption, but the problem is so big, with so many Party and Government officials involved, that it may defeat their best efforts. We should seize this opportunity to assist them by approving and funding the ABA's December 2005 rule of law project proposal. End Summary. PMU 18 -------------- ¶2. (SBU) Vietnam's press has been operating at maximum RPMs over the evolving corruption story involving Public Management Unit 18, a construction company handling large infrastructure projects, some with substantial ODA contributions. A business contact in HCMC noted that PMU-18 was the recipient of World Bank, Asian Development Bank and Japanese ODA. Even by Vietnam's standards, the multi- million dollar scale of graft in the PMU-18 case is enormous and the case has revealed titillating details about the gambling and nepotism habits of the senior Government officials involved that have entranced Vietnamese readers. The press, particularly the popular Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper (Ref A),has pursued this case rabidly, a level of transparency that the Party leadership would not have tolerated previously. The involvement of Vietnam's national soccer team has also captured the public's attention. The case broke with the revelations that Bui Tien Dung, the head of PMU-18, was part of a ring placing enormous bets on soccer games, including games played by the national team. This earned Dung the nickname "million-dollar gambler" and led to a deeper investigation that netted even larger fish. ¶3. (SBU) The Deputy Minister of Transportation, Nguyen Viet Tien, was implicated in the scandal by a March 28 Ministry of Public Security report and required to step down; on March 30, a spokesman for the Prime Minister declared that "the Transport Minister must take responsibility, and after that deputy ministers must follow. Joint responsibility will be defined through investigation." On April 1, the Party announced that a proposal to remove Transport Minister Dao Dinh Binh had been submitted to the Politburo. Binh submitted his resignation April 3. Speaking to reporters afterwards, Binh said he "takes full responsibility for all wrongdoing." World Bank representative Klaus Rohland told the Ambassador April 3 that First Vice Minister Pham The Minh is in charge at the Ministry of Transportation. ¶4. (SBU) The activity has not been confined to the Government. The Communist Party has also been drawn in, and is concerned to the point where senior Politburo member Phan Dzien (among the most powerful Party officials) gave an interview to the staid Party mouthpiece "Nhan Dan" (People's Daily) on the PMU 18 case. In a remarkable public display of Party humility, Phan Dzien said the Party bears responsibility for corruption in its ranks and in the Government. "The case proved a serious decline in the virtue and lifestyle of many cadres and Party members, many of whom hold senior positions," he said, in the widely read (and reprinted) article. The Larger Problem -------------- ¶5. (SBU) The PMU 18 scandal is the dramatic and photogenic tip of a huge corruption iceberg in Vietnam. The concentration on market reforms and economic development over the last 20 years with little or no attention to public administration reform has led to an epidemic of rent-seeking behavior in virtually every sector of the State. Not only big construction contracts, but every single other transaction Vietnamese people conduct with their Government, HANOI 00000771 002.2 OF 004 including medical treatment, land transactions, business licenses, school registration and, above all, traffic enforcement, involves paying bribes of various sizes. The corruption that bedevils average citizens has been verified by external observers; Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) for 2005 groups Vietnam with Belarus, Eritrea, Honduras, Kazakstan, Nicaragua, Palestine, Ukraine, Zambia and Zimbabwe in a ten-way tie for 107th place with a score of 2.6. "Less than 3 on the CPI," TI says, "indicates a severe corruption problem." ¶6. (SBU) Vietnam's own internal corruption survey is more specific, and even bleaker. The Communist Party's Internal Affairs Commission, working with the Swedish International Development Agency, conducted a year-long survey into corruption behaviors and attitudes across Vietnam. They surveyed and conducted interviews with thousands of citizens and civil servants in more than a dozen ministries and State- owned enterprises, and produced a report in November 2005. The 100-page report reveals the pervasiveness of corruption. More than 40 percent of the civil servants polled admitted to taking bribes. More than 60 percent of the Vietnamese people reported having to pay bribes. Land and construction agencies are perceived as corrupt by more than 90 percent of people and businesses, and by more than 85 percent of civil servants. Over 46 percent of businesses say they routinely pay bribes when they meet with difficulties; 55 percent of businesses give "presents" to public officials on holidays to avoid problems in the future. A quarter of businesses surveyed pay pre-emptive bribes to avoid "difficulties." ¶7. (SBU) The justice sector is no better. In seven provinces, 50 percent of people interviewed said they "pay extra money" when going to the People's Procuracy or the People's Court. Over 57 percent said they pay extra money in the event of a traffic violation. Le Manh Luan, Chief of Staff of the Internal Affairs Commission of the CPV, told Poloff that as high as those numbers seem, they are probably even higher in reality because they only reflect what people were willing to admit in face-to-face interviews; if the survey accounted for people's reluctance to admit giving or taking bribes, the percentages would likely be higher. Nguyen Quang Ngoc, the Swedish Embassy expert who also worked on the report, agreed that the numbers almost certainly understate the scope of the problem. ¶8. (SBU) The most striking aspect of the CPV's report may not be what it contains, but rather what they did with it: the normally secretive and uncommunicative Communist Party allowed the report to be translated into English and circulated among the diplomatic and NGO community. They also sent copies to Vietnamese news agencies, as well as all public offices. According to press contacts, the CPV stopped short of permitting the news agencies to publish the details of the report, which is still labeled "draft" and therefore considered an internal Party document. But the relatively wide release of the report, not to mention the willingness of the normally reclusive Internal Affairs Commission (which had been dodging us for almost two years) to meet with us, was unprecedented. ¶9. (SBU) "Our greatest concern is bribery and the connection between state officials and the people's money," the CPV's Luan told Poloff. "Last year we were able to prosecute only 300 cases of corruption in the whole country, and yet the public sector climate is such that more than one-third of public officials believe that a bribe-related `bonus' is normal and that they deserve compensation outside their regular salary." The circulation of the report, he said, is designed to send a message to public employees that the Party and the Government are getting serious about corruption, and that it will have consequences. The new anti-corruption law (passed in November 2005),together with major statements by the Prime Minister to the National Assembly that he will head the new national anti-corruption standing committee, are designed to send a similar message to the people. ¶10. (SBU) That message is a very important one, because it goes to the heart of the Party's concerns about corruption: as the most pressing issue for the Vietnamese public (64 percent of the population rates the issue as "the most serious matter" facing Vietnam today),the Party's apparent inability to solve the corruption problem is corrosive to its popular legitimacy. In early March, at the end of the officially-sanctioned public comment period on the draft Political Report to be adopted during the Party's 10th National Congress (refs B and C),Luan told Poloff that the Party had received more than 20,000 comments from citizens, HANOI 00000771 003.2 OF 004 and "many" of those had focused on corruption. An editor who created a survey on the Political Report on his highly popular news website told Poloff that he had received "many thousands" of responses and that most of them had been primarily concerned with corruption. Turning the Ship -------------- ¶11. (SBU) The corruption problem is enormous and well- recognized, and it is a challenge to the Party's and the Government's legitimacy, but considering the massive pervasiveness, what can the GVN do about it? GVN and CPV experts recognize that the situation has reached a point where aggressive enforcement is not a solution; the authorities literally cannot arrest everybody. "If we actually arrested all the corrupt traffic officers," Luan said, "there would be no one to control the streets of Vietnam's cities and there would be chaos." (Comment: Actually, chaos is an apt description of Hanoi's traffic most days. End Comment.) This is also acknowledged in the CPV report, where demoralized civil servants say the pervasiveness of corruption, the lack of protection for whistleblowers and the failure to punish corrupt officials means that more than 80 percent of them would neither challenge nor report corruption in their organizations. ¶12. (SBU) Facing this reality, Party and GVN officials tasked with combating corruption have decided to focus on incremental changes that strengthen the framework against corruption rather than try to adopt a pure enforcement approach. Luan said that the initial steps to counter traffic police graft are to require three traffic police officers at any checkpoint; forbid traffic police officers from carrying more than VND 50,000 (about three dollars) on their persons at any time; and, requiring traffic police to sign receipts for fines collected. For higher-level corruption, the plan is to develop clear rules and regulations against corruption (through the new anti- corruption law) and to adopt asset declaration rules to assist in identifying officials who are enriching themselves. Here, however, Luan said Vietnam faces severe cultural obstacles. "Many corrupt officials do not keep money or assets themselves, but instead pass their earnings on to family members, sometimes distant ones." A corrupt official, therefore, may show no increase at all in his personal assets. "Making it more difficult," Luan said, "is the fact that many Vietnamese do not use banks, and establishing the value of land and buildings is not well understood." The GVN and the Party rely a great deal on the press, he said, to ferret out corruption. ¶13. (SBU) Relying on the press for this function causes severe heartburn for Party and Government officials at times, a senior Embassy press contact told Poloff with a grin. "We report on corruption cases a lot, even when it gets uncomfortable for the Ministry of Culture and Information. But we tell them that if they try to tell us to stop, we will publish the fact that they told us to stop, and so far they think that would be worse than the embarrassment of Government officials." Still, he acknowledged, it is possible to go too far. One of his young reporters did a photoessay on the homes of the senior officials of the Hanoi People's Committee (a bastion of political conservatism) that he had to spike because of the potential consequences of publishing it, he said. ¶14. (SBU) Dr. Nguyen Van Thanh, Director of the Institute for Inspection (an arm of the Government Inspectorate, an agency-level inspector-general and auditing organization) explained the main steps of the Prime Minister's action plan on anti-corruption: - In the next few months, the GVN will pass the necessary guidelines and regulations necessary to implement the anti- corruption law; - The GVN will launch an anti-corruption awareness-raising campaign, based at the National Academy for Public Administration. This will include training for all branches, agencies and ministries of the GVN; - The GVN will establish two specialized anticorruption authorities: one in the Government Inspectorate, and one in the Ministry of Public Security; - The GVN will establish a national steering committee to coordinate anti-corruption activities; and, - Each agency will develop a code of conduct for anti- corruption. ¶15. (SBU) Dr. Thanh said that the most important part of the HANOI 00000771 004.2 OF 004 new law is that it prevents corruption by "closing the doors" and making public officials and the people aware that corruption is unnecessary, inefficient and illegal. "We need to reduce the opportunity to engage in corruption," Dr. Thanh explained. "This will involve an anti-harassment component of the new law. It will give people more information, create more transparency and provide oversight in the form of the new anti-corruption authorities to whom the people can appeal." ¶16. (SBU) Luan, asked about this interpretation of the GVN's efforts, added that although prevention will be the major part of the anti-corruption fight and "all measures will be made with an understanding of Vietnam's social, commercial, economic and political context," the strategy will include anti-corruption investigations and prosecutions. So Important -------------- ¶17. (SBU) Perhaps the most insightful comments on the importance of anti-corruption efforts came from designated GVN Wise Woman Pham Chi Lan, veteran member of the Prime Minister's Research Commission. "How can we build our democracy without responding to the public's concerns?" she asked Poloff, rhetorically. "We must do this for our own people, as well as for the purpose of creating an attractive climate for investors." The future of the country is at stake, she said. "Corruption causes a brain drain in Vietnam. Smart and dynamic young people see corrupt officials and the public sector gobbling resources and buying up assets with graft. It crushes their motivation to stay in Vietnam and get rich and build the country. Without attacking corruption, we cannot build our nation." Comment -------------- ¶18. (SBU) They get it. The Party gets it, the GVN gets it and the National Assembly gets it. The people understand, as does the media. There is near unanimity on the issue of combating corruption in Vietnam, even (according to the CPV's internal survey) among remorseful bribe-taking civil servants. However, there has been plenty of soul-searching when other major corruption scandals have been revealed before with no significant impact on the problem. The challenges are daunting. The pervasiveness of corruption, the informal personal and familial links between individuals at the top and the networks of patronage they control and the tiny public sector salaries that cap out for a minister at approximately USD 200 per month present a tremendously difficult hurdle for even the most dedicated anti-corruption crusaders. GVN and CPV activists hold out hope that in this area, they will be able to follow the path of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea to overcome corruption. ¶19. (SBU) The high profile of the PMU-18 case, the importance to the public of the corruption issue, the CPV's willingness to address the issue and publicize embarrassing data, and the NA, CPV and GVN's joint efforts to address corruption through structural reforms suggest that we have the opportunity to make a positive contribution to the rule of law in Vietnam. One excellent option to do that would be to approve the ABA rule of law project funding proposal submitted in December 2005 (Ref D); we should take advantage of the favorable timing to move it forward as soon as possible. End Comment. MARINE