Colonel Phan Anh Minh, Director of HCM City Police Department candidly admitted to limited outcomes of the city's fight against corruption despite the apparent obviously increase in the problem.
At a recent municipal meeting on the issue, Colonel Minh said that many corruption cases were brought to light quite late, offering the possibility for violators to hide their assets.
Colonel Phan Anh Minh, Director of HCM City Police Department
"Most of corruption cases are often related to officials who are party members. However, under the Politburo's Instruction 15, police are not allowed to run investigations over periods which include surveillance of party members. So, corruption uncovered by the municipal police is usually through the inspection of other cases,” he noted.
According to Minh, foreign trade is seen as posing the most latent risk for corruption with half of the cases found to have involved customs officers.
The General Customs Department said that all officials of the department were made to take an anti-corruption pledge, but early this year, a customs official in HCM City was arrested for taking bribes of nearly VND1 billion.
Some days later, a customs official at Tan Son Nhat International Airport was found involved in a smuggling ring that had imported 844 Iphones and Ipads.
The colonel also raised his serious doubt on the report of the Government Inspectorate that between 2007 and 2014, only 20 cases had been detected through inaccurate asset enumeration out the 5.6 million officials made to submit a statement.
By late December 2015, Deputy Chief Inspector of HCM City Nguyen Thi Ngoc Nga had made the rather optimistic claim that no corruption cases had been uncovered in the city in the first nine months of the year.
