Via The Cambodia Daily: Global Fund Reveals Network Of Bribery in Health Ministry. Excerpt:
Officials working for the Ministry of Health have engaged in setting up fake bank accounts to receive hundred of thousands of dollars in bribes and have directly told businesses that government contracts could only be secured if large sums of cash were paid to individuals, a report by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria found.
The report, released Friday, implicates senior officials of the National Center for Parasitology, Entomology and Malaria Control (CNM) and the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Dermatology and STD Control (NCHADS), both arms of the Ministry of Health, as well as Medicam, an umbrella network of health NGOs, of participating in a network of bribery, as well as double- and triple-charging donors for the same expenses.
“The investigation has identified sufficient credible and substantive evidence of corruption, procurement irregularities, and misuse and misappropriation of grant funds,” the Global Fund’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) said in the report.
“The OIG finds that expenses of grant funds amounting to USD 12,104,761 were compromised,” through practices such as inappropriate facilitation payments to secure contracts, other procurement irregularities and outright deceit.
The principal recipients of the more than $12 million in funds were the Ministry of Health and its NCHADS and CNM branches, according to the OIG.
The report also found cases of incomplete or missing government procurement files, missing bank statements from accounts, information withheld by Acleda Bank PLC and the Foreign Trade Bank of Cambodia regarding possible misuse of funds, and other missing or unsupported documentation of expenditures.
“As a result, out of approximately USD 220.3 million of expenses [in Cambodia], supporting documentation relating to approximately USD 86.9 million was made available to the OIG and subsequently reviewed,” according to the report.
This meant that more than $133 million in funds to the ministry could not be properly reviewed, the report says.
The link will take you to the OIG report. The Global Fund has also issued a news release about this case. The bribes appear to have come from suppliers of insecticide-treated mosquito nets.
