Fictitious authorities jobs and contracts, political patronage, embezzlement, and college workers and civil servants who use authorities financial institution accounts as their private checkbooks.
These are simply a number of the scandalous findings launched late this week by Haiti’s Anti-Corruption Unit following the investigations of 10 completely different state-run establishments and businesses that embrace the municipalities of Petit Goave, Fort-Liberte, Saint-Raphael and Anse Rouge; the nationwide lottery; Haiti Nationwide Police and the Faculty of Regulation and Economics in Gonaives.
In all, the conclusion was the identical: Haiti’s public administration is a cesspool of corruption through which the actions of civil servants and elected officers go unchecked they usually do as they like with out issues concerning the penalties. The fee has been the lack of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} from state coffers in a poverty-stricken nation lagging behind in growth and unable to handle deepening inequality within the face of a number of crises.
“There’s huge dysfunction, and waste,” Hans Jacques Ludwig Joseph, the unit’s anti-corruption chief, advised the Miami Herald after the discharge of the 25-page report. “It’s a public administration that has been completely weakened due to this phenomenon we name corruption that’s multidimensional and has amongst its actors distinguished personalities.”
The report singles out a lot of well-known figures — city mayors, the top of the nationwide lottery, a present member of the board of director of the Central Financial institution, the federal government’s regulatory company, and the previous head of the Haiti Nationwide Police. The findings vary from abuse of workplace and mismanagement resulting in the lack of authorities income to the extra severe acts of embezzlement of state funds and property.
The allegations within the reviews date again to the federal government of late Haitian President Jovenel Moise, who took workplace in 2017 and was killed on July 7, 2021. The reviews had been launched this week, Joseph mentioned, as a result of the investigations had been simply accomplished. His investigators have dozens of different allegations they’re pursuing on corruption in public administration throughout the nation that they hope to quickly publish, he added.
“The system that has been established to confirm, management, to anticipate these sorts of actions that public workers and representatives of the state are doing, they don’t seem to be sufficiently efficient,” mentioned Joseph, including that the subsequent step is for the nation’s justice system to do its job. ”I at all times say that corruption has a reputation. It’s referred to as impunity. Should you shouldn’t have an efficient justice system that has the political will to pursue people, to guage and sanction those who have to be, then it’s troublesome to attain the outcomes that you really want…. Now the justice system must take the wheel; if it doesn’t than we will likely be producing reviews with out getting any outcomes.”
In some circumstances, Joseph is asking for felony prosecution on prices of affect peddling, embezzlement of presidency funds and different acts of corruption. In others, just like the one involving the previous head of the Haiti Nationwide Police, Leon Charles, who was changed late final yr, Joseph is asking for an investigation by authorities auditors, the Superior Court docket of Accounts and Administrative Disputes.
Charles, who presently serving on the Group of American States, is accused of “mismanagement” after failing to tell human useful resource officers and others inside the Haitian nationwide police about officers and civilian workers who had retired, or had been fired or laid off, who had been not eligible for a stipend enhance on their debit playing cards.
“This slowness triggered, for the interval from December 2020 to February 2021, a shortfall of round eighteen million 200 and forty thousand” gourdes the report mentioned, about $144,080 in present trade charges.
The findings on Charles are among the many least egregious. Extra severe accusations concerned loans by the Industrial Improvement Fund that got primarily based on political patronage and did not be reimbursed. Joseph is recommending felony motion in opposition to Edgar Jeudy, a present member of the board of administrators of the Central Financial institution, for abuse of workplace and stopping the perform of the justice system in an investigation involving the fund.
Amongst different allegations within the findings:
—The mayor of Petit Goave, Limongy Samson, housed the city’s metropolis corridor within the dwelling of his mom. He’s accused of utilizing authorities funds to make enhancements, and his mom is accused of not paying property taxes.
—In Fort-Liberte in northeast Haiti, authorities discovered “numerous acts of corruption,” together with embezzlement, had been carried out “from begin to end” in a venture to impress the city of Dumas. Funds had been misappropriated, investigators discovered, and the legal guidelines on public contracts weren’t revered by both city officers or representatives of the contracting agency.
—In Saint-Raphael, investigators discovered that funds had been granted for a soccer stadium that was by no means constructed and the contractors used nonexistent addresses.
—There was a shortfall of greater than $2.1 million within the nationwide lottery that ought to have gone to the federal government treasury. The anti-corruption unit is recommending public motion in opposition to the top of the lottery, Marie Margareth Fortune Daudier, for embezzlement of public property and abuse of workplace, and Jean Moise Fortune for complicity within the embezzlement of public property.
If there may be one case that reveals how public workers consider themselves as working fiefdoms it’s the Gonaives legislation college. Investigators mentioned they discovered “a scenario of anarchy, generalized dysfunction and virtually complete opacity within the mode of operation” of the college each academically and when it comes to administrative and monetary plan.
The college’s former president, Luc Benoit Pierre, advised investigators that 25% of the three,000 college students had been accepted with out proof that they’d even gradudated from highschool. Investigators discovered that regardless of a number of efforts by Pierre to take corrective measures, a bunch of workers circumvented him and succeeded “due to the opposition and unhealthy religion of [law school] officers who get pleasure from this chaotic scenario that characterizes the functioning of [the law school] at present.”
Two workers, Roland Paphius and Cheddlie Cherenfant, are accused of embezzling $67,396 by issuing checks to staffers for “fictitious providers that don’t have anything to do with the assignments of their respective positions.”
When Pierre realized about what was occurring and tried to place an finish to the executive mismanagement by blocking entry to the financial institution accounts for legislation college officers, the culprits opened a brand new account, allegedly with the assistance of the vice dean.
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