Toxic cycle

If Taiwan can do it, why can’t we?

Jail erring high officials, that is. Just last Friday, the Supreme Court of Taiwan upheld the bribery convictions of five senior judges in what has been described as some of the worst cases of judicial corruption in the island nation’s history.

With the ruling, former high court judge Tsai Kuang-chih is off to serve a 20-year term and pay a fine of Tw$3.5 million (US$119,000) for taking bribes of around Tw$3 million to absolve fellow judge Chang Ping-lung in a corruption trial in 2005. Tsai’s accomplice in this crime, Fang A-sheng, another chief high court judge, was sentenced to 10-and-a-half years in prison, while Chang got a jail time of one year.

In a second case involving Tsai, the judge facilitated the payment of Tw$3.5 million in bribes to his colleagues Chen Jung-ho and Li Chun-ti to acquit a former legislator belonging to Taiwan’s dominant Koumintang Party who was indicted in 2004 of cornering kickbacks in a land development case. Convicted in 2006, the legislator appealed the verdict to the high court, where Tsai, Chen and Li found him not guilty.

It was money, as usual, that did the trick. The ex-legislator reportedly gave Li Tw$2 million and another Tw$2 million to Tsai’s girlfriend. The couple kept Tw$500,000 for themselves and gave the remaining Tw$1.5 million to Chen, right in his office. For their crimes, Chen and Li were sentenced to 18 years and 11-and-a-half years, respectively.

This isn’t the first time that Taiwan has clapped in jail high and mighty citizens who transgressed the law. The most high-profile case involves ex-president Chen Shui-bian, whose election in 2000 heralded so much promise as it marked the first time in half a century that Taiwan’s chief executive didn’t come from the entrenched Koumintang Party. Chen survived an assassination attempt while campaigning for reeelection in 2004, but was eventually convicted of bribery charges along with his wife. He is now serving a 20-year jail term for the misuse of some Tw$14.8 million of government funds.

And so on. Elsewhere in Asia, South Korea has jailed at least two ex-presidents, Singapore has kicked out the chief of its anticorruption agency over an underling’s misappropriation of more than S$1.7 million (US$1.34 million) in public funds (a rare case of governmental scandal in what is universally seen as Asia’s least corrupt country), and Indonesia’s anticorruption court has, in the last five years, scored a raft of successful convictions against prominent politicians and public officials.

A research paper by Emil P. Bolongaita published online by the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre compares the record of the Corruption Eradication Commission of Indonesia (KPK) and the Office of the Ombudsman of the Philippines, and sees a huge difference. “Why was the KPK, in just five years, able to reach a 100-percent conviction rate against top officials in all major branches of the Indonesian government, while the Philippine Ombudsman has scored only few convictions in its 20-year history?” it asks.

“Part of this success can be explained by considerable investigative powers given to KPK, which the Philippine Ombudsman does not hold. Also, rigorous pretesting of every prosecution and a highly efficient anticorruption court contribute to KPK’s success.”

That’s a valid explanation, but an incomplete one. The bigger question is why the Philippine Ombudsman does not hold the same extent of investigative powers—and there is only one answer: Because those running the political system and thus potentially in the cross-hairs of any Ombudsman investigation refuses to thus empower it. The self-serving nature of the country’s political system simply thwarts any meaningful attempt at sustained transparency and irreproachability in public governance.

The grasping, circle-the-wagons mindset of the ruling system is what accounts for the lethal apathy at prosecuting wrongdoing that has allowed the Marcoses to escape accountability for over two decades now for their well-documented pillage. It’s the same penchant for short-term political accommodation that allowed Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to get away with pardoning Joseph Estrada for the crime of plunder, and herself to so far dodge any reckoning for, say, stealing the elections, and caught on tape at that—a crime of such enormousness that in other countries would have merited the severest punishment.

And because no one gets punished, the cycle of official crime and corruption goes on—grows more toxic, like the cancer that it is.