The Tribune

By AVA TURNQUEST

Tribune Chief Reporter

aturnquest@tribunemedia.net

CAMPAIGN finance reform was yesterday singled out as one of the most important elements for transparent governance by a global anti-corruption network seeking to establish a local chapter in the country.

Alejandro Salas, regional director at Transparency International, underscored the implications of unregulated political campaign financing during a press conference to announce his group’s intended partnership with advocacy group Citizens for a Better Bahamas.

“Where money makes its way to politics,” he said, “and especially when we don’t know the origin of the money or the amount of the money, or for what it’s being spent on – it opens huge doors.

“In countries like Mexico, Guatemala, etc, it’s a door that opens for drug dealers, so there are many candidates financed by drug dealers and they are of course responding to the interests of the masters giving the money. Those are extreme situations but in most cases it’s just business interests.”

He added: “If I don’t know how much money ‘Mr X’ is giving to which political party, I can’t monitor, I can’t observe once the person is elected how he or she is paying back to that campaign financier.”

Transparency International has established partnerships and local chapters in more than 100 countries and on every continent.

The global network has strong ties with Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, and will now turn its focus to the Bahamas at the request of a former employee, Bahamian lawyer Lemarque Campbell.

Mr Campbell served as a legal analyst for the network’s chapter in Georgia (Europe), and is now a representative for Citizens for a Better Bahamas (CBB).

Most recently vocal against the implementation of value added tax, Mr Campbell said CBB intends to bring considerable focus to issues concerning political campaign finance legislation, public procurement, freedom of information, and public disclosures of elected officials.

Mr Campbell said CBB drafted recommendations to the government on the recently tabled Freedom of Information Bill. A top suggestion is that the information commissioner be selected by a parliamentary committee, instead of on the recommendation of the prime minister alone.

“There needs to be a parliamentary committee comprised of government and opposition members, also the public should have a say in the selection of the information commissioner. The names of these candidates should be published and released for feedback,” Mr Campbell added.

After completing a short accreditation process, CBB hopes to take advantage of the global network’s access to research, technical support, and grant funding to strengthen campaign efforts.

Mr Salas said: “We work with partners, you have the local knowledge, you know what are the priority problems, you know who are the reform-oriented members of government and in politics. You know the reality of living here, so we are mostly going to transmit international best practices, facilitate contact with countries that have similar problems so that they can help each other more of the type of work we do.”

He added: “We’re not worried in particular (about corruption in the Bahamas), but I think there is momentum with organisations that want to change things. The problem of corruption is not new; it’s an ancient problem. We are not thinking everything will be solved quickly, but we have to start.”

Transparency International annually ranks countries based on how corrupt its public sector is perceived to be, using data from surveys of leading institutions like the World Bank. In its 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index – on a scale of 0, very corrupt, to 100 being very clean – the Bahamas was ranked at 24 with a score of 71 out of a possible 100.

However, Mr Salas pointed out that the country has not been featured on the index historically because of the lack of data - an issue that is at the forefront of talks with its hopeful-partner CBB.