Georgians Question Squeeze on Bribe-Taking

Saturday, 13 March, 2010

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Ana Kandelaki

International watchdogs have recorded an improvement in Georgia’s rating on the anti-corruption scale regularly in recent years - though local people are not rushing to applaud.

Citizens concede that dealing with policemen, local government offices or other state bodies, which a few years ago, was impossible without paying a bribe, can now be done straightforwardly.

Transparency International in 2009 raised Georgia to 66th place out of the 180 countries it monitors. Global Integrity, another worldwide monitoring group, said on February 13 that Georgia is no longer a country with mass corruption, and gave it the best figures in the former Soviet Union outside the Baltic states.

After President Mikhail Saakashvili came to power in 2003, he announced a mass battle against dishonest officials. Observers say he has seen particular success in the civil service, the education system - which even in Soviet times was often only accessed by payment of a bribe - as well as in the police.

“Georgia has the most uncorrupt government. This is not Saakashvili’s PR, as some people think. It is a reality,” said the president on December 8 at a ceremony to award people who had distinguished themselves in road construction.

But despite his enthusiasm, many do not believe that high-level corruption has been banished, even though many of them have not had to pay a bribe for years.

“That corruption has been reduced at lower levels is obvious to everyone, but you cannot say that about people at the top,” Tamar Karosanidze of Transparency International said.

Vakhtang Lezhava, the chief advisor to Georgia’s prime minister, said he was getting tired of unfounded allegations of high-level corruption.

“As for this elite corruption, there is no basis for such suspicions and no one can substantiate them. Some people find it hard to understand that Georgia has largely been freed from corruption,” he said.

“There is not one investigation where anyone has produced facts confirming corruption. There is no confirmation of it. But many people struggle to recognise this and they invent some mythical elite corruption despite the fact that people tell all opinion polls that they do not know of any facts of corruption.”

But despite such assurances, voters are dubious about the government’s claims that the fight against corruption is more than a publicity campaign, given how it uses the media. Television shows regularly feature the arrests of corrupt officials by officers of the department of constitutional security, who are accompanied by cameras on their operations.

The shows often broadcast secret footage of the arrested officials taking bribes, and have been successful in persuading bureaucrats of the risk of accepting even small bribes.

“Whenever I see these pictures, I ask myself, ‘Have these people really decided to take the money?’ These ten laris (six US dollars) could cost them ten years in prison,” said a Georgian woman who asked not to give her second name.

She works in a passport office, where corruption used to be rife, saying that she lived a lot better before Saakashvili came to power since she used to make 50 laris in bribes every day.

“Whenever I filled in a form, I was given five or ten laris. I did not ask them do this, but they all knew about it. Now I get just half the money I got in those days. But I must not accept even one tetri (one hundredth of a lari) from anyone. I would lose my job. Anyway, no one offers money. Everyone is scared,” she said.

Experts say that the televised arrests have been instrumental in fighting such entrenched corruption, although many people doubt that the methods employed in rooting it out are strictly legal, since they assume the subject’s guilt before any trial.

Almost everyone who spoke to IWPR believed that corruption was now restricted to a small circle close to the administration.

“I do not mix in those circles where anything is decided with the help of a bribe. This is possible only at the highest level,” said Tornike Gamtsemlidze, a 47-year-old Tbilisi resident.

In this regard, opposition politicians have expressed concern over what they say is the lack of transparency in the government’s dealings with business.

“In the ministries of defence and the interior there are huge state purchasing bodies that an outsider cannot find out about,“ said Georgi Tsagareishvili, a member of parliament from the Unified Opposition list.

The conduct of tenders for road construction has come under particular scrutiny. The Georgian Young Lawyers' Association has investigated the process, and its chairwoman Tamar Khidasheli said the results of the probe were worrying.

“We took one particular [tender] and studied how [it] was conducted. As a result a series of procedural violations became clear. We are talking about the provision of a lot of work, with a cost in millions, yet information about it was only published in the local media and was not announced internationally, although that is compulsory,” she said.

“Many companies were disqualified for no reason. But the most interesting discovery was at the end of the probe, when it became clear that the winning company financed the [pro-Saakashvili] National Movement in the elections. This says a lot.”

The ruling National Movement strongly denies any connection between donations made and the winners of state tenders.

“The National Movement does not take part in any business deals and does not interfere in tenders. The most important thing is that the work is done well. Therefore, the company that wins the tender is the one that can do the work best,” said Gocha Tevdoradze, a member of parliament from the ruling party, and head of its office in the city of Kutaisi.

“Accusations of corruption in the organisation of state orders and tenders are just inventions.”

And it has proven to be difficult for any of the government’s critics to find any specific evidence of bribe-taking among the political elite.

“Since elite corruption is only in the elite, uncovering it is much harder than uncovering corruption at a lower level, which the authorities are successfully combating. Elite corruption is distinguished from it by being hidden and civil organisations do not have access to the information who could reveal corrupt deals on this level,” political commentator Zaal Anjaparidze said.

Ana Kandelaki is a freelance journalist.