Rising public confidence

MACC chief commissioner Tan Sri Abu Kassim Mohamed talks to The Star about the challenges in fighting corruption and the need to get public support in the battle.

Q: It has been 5 years since MACC has been set up, what is your assessment how MACC has been doing?

When we started to transform the organisation from ACA to MACC in 2009, the objective was to make MACC more transparent. The clear difference between ACA and MACC was the establishment of 5 committees (the Anti-Corruption Advisory Board, the Special Committee on Corruption, the Complaints Committee, the Operations Review Panel, and the Corruption Consultation and Prevention Panel) to oversee MACC. This makes our organisation more transparent and involves the public too in terms of our own operations.

An anti corruption agency must get public support and win public confidence. This is very important to ensure that it has performed their duty effectively.

The ACA is older than Hong Kong’s ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption). The ICAC actually modelled their agency after the ACA. They then rectified, modified and included civil society and the public to play a role.

That is why when we started to transform ACA in 2009, we went back to Hong Kong to study ICAC and how they have taken it further. There is a lot that needs to be done in terms of catching up with the expectation of the public.

Q: Has the public started to ‘embrace’ MACC?

Back in 2009 and 2010, the level of public confidence towards MACC was at its lowest. An independent study by a university showed the level was 30 to 31%. That was very bad.

Last year, the study showed the level of confidence has increased to more than 60%. The survey was a demographic representation of society including people in the cities, rural areas, government and private sectors. The criticism and negative tone being used against MACC too has reduced compared to in 2009 with the Teoh Beng Hock case.

(Teoh was questioned at MACC’s office in Shah Alam on July 15 2009 for nine hours. He was found dead the next day on the rooftop of the 5th floor) Frankly, I am not sure if there is a 60% public confidence in KL. It may be lower.

We found many members of the public do not even know the difference between the old ACA and MACC. And because of this, their perception and confidence level might also be different. Our own target is to get more than 80% public confidence Then you can see and feel the difference and real change of the public towards MACC. But right now some people don’t know they are five different committees overlooking our operation and that these bodies represent the public.

Q: How overwhelemed is MACC? It seems like everything and anything from compensation paid to a parent by a restaurant owner who raped an underaged girl, to political corruption, government tenders, money politics in party election, corruption in the private sector, smuggling are all now being referred to MACC.

I discovered that whatever the issue, because of the trust and expectation of the public towards MACC – we are the first organisation they would refer to.

As for the cases referred to us, some are outside our legal framework. Also for an anti- corruption agency, we need evidence. For example, people say such and such thing happened because of corruption or question why a particular loan was given to a person with a restructuring that is so beneficial to that person and conclude it has to do with corruption.

What they show to us is only the symptom or outcome of corruption. What we need to know is who paid the bribe, when was it paid, how it was paid, was there any witness or is there any evidence that will help us bring those people involved to court.

Alleging a person is corrupt without evidence carries no weight for us to bring him to court. The standard of proof needed by the court is high.We must have a strong case where we must have sufficient evidence.

When the public reports a case, they want us to go and get evidence from people who don’t want to co-operate.

That is why is criminology, corruption is sometimes termed as a ‘victimless crime’ because the one giving gets something in return and the one receiving gets something he wants, so both parties involved in corruption are happy. They are not the ones who came forward to report it.

So when we ask them, they deny a bribe was paid. And when we go through their accounts, we cannot see a trace of where a bribe payment has been made. They know and understand that bribes should not be documented.

This is one of the biggest problems when we investigate corruption. For me, corruption is not victimless because the victim is society.

Sometimes, people report corruption based on hearsay. I had a situation where this person said ‘I have to pay a bribe to get this job done in dealing with government agencies’. But when I sent my officers to his office to get more details, he said; ‘No, I heard it from somebody’ or ‘I am very sorry I have my business and I don’t want to jeopardise it.’ So how can we bring somebody to court if those involved do not want to cooperate?

Many other countries are successful in fighting corruption because their society do not tolerate corruption. When the tolerance level is very low any attempt at a bribe that person will go to the enforcement agency to report it.

But in our society, people don’t want to get involved. They don’t want to go to court and be a witnesses.

Q: Recently you were quoted as saying the conviction rate was 54% in 2009 but now it’s gone up to 85% How do you come to that figure?

In many countries if they can get 10% to court it is good. That is quite standard.
In Malaysia we investigate corruption by several levels and there is overt and covert investigations.

The overt or open investigation is where we call you, take your statement, go to your house, raid your office and all that. In 2013, there were 976 open cases of which 509 people were arrested.

There are also a lot of people who send letters and emails but this is so general and we don’t initiate an open investigation for this.

The letter says for example ‘The law enforcement officer or government servant in this place is so corrupted. Please go and check. I paid them.’ but the letter does not mention who paid the money and when he paid the money’.

If someone alleges that a police officer is so corrupt and takes bribes from those in illegal activities like gambling dens, we need to know which one. Because if we go and ask these people ‘Did you pay a bribe, from experience, I don’t see any possibility they will say ‘Yes’ .

So for this purpose, we cannot go for an open investigation so we do it covertly. We need to do observation and it takes a longer time. We have to really verify.

We have started to use a modern and a more sophisticated approach in dealing with corruption and bringing people to court now. This is part of our transformation. And there is a great improvement in terms of being able to detect and bring people to court.

The covert investigation doesn’t go to court immediately. We will investigate it covertly first, then change it later to an open investigation and only from there it goes to court. That is the process. Covert investigation takes time, money and hours and it is not easy. 

For example, if a local authority is said to be involved in corruption to approve a development order, it is not easy to get co-operation from the developer to admit that he got the order because he had paid a bribe. That is where the covert operation takes longer time. We have to take time to be close to people in the industry and to get people who want to co-operate with us. Most of the time when people say they will cooperate with us and give us information, they don’t want to go to court and testify.

Q: Now with all sorts of trivial matters also being referred to MACC , wouldn’t it be better to for MACC to focus on big cases or issues and leave it to the police to deal with the smaller and trivial corruption cases?

I’ve got no problem with that. I would be very happy if there was that kind of policy. But under the law, MACC is required to investigate all cases regardless of the size and even if the bribe is as small as RM50. I would be very happy if the government says ‘focus on just big cases’. But there are many experts in the world who say that corruption is not about how big it is! What is more important is its impact to society. 

For example it may cost only RM500 to smuggle things across the border but the cost to society may go beyond the money has been paid. Just take a kg of drugs being brought in and how are you going to calculate that against a RM500 bribe given to the authority at the border when the cost to society and the youth is huge? What if it is firearms they are smuggling in? It may cost lives. So a lot of experts in the world are of the view that people should not look at only the big cases because sometimes the small cases are more damaging.

Q: Lahad Datu is a hub for smuggling activities and those implicated are often police and enforcement officers. How easy is it to investigate this?

The first thing is to get information. In all investigation, the crucial part is to get as much information as possible regarding criminal activities. The more information we get, it is much easier for us to investigate. For this reason , we need the other enforcement agencies to cooperate with us. People can tell us that that area is so corrupted and all - but only those people involved know who they are and what kind of corruption and so on. If enforcement agencies don’t give us information and don’t tell us what is going on and who is involved and all that, we can’t proceed. We can but we can’t be so effective in getting the people involved.