Ani­ka Gumbs-San­di­ford

The con­tro­ver­sial Com­mis­sion of En­quiry in­to the op­er­a­tions of the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of T&T (Ude­cott) and the con­struc­tion sec­tor is what may have main­ly con­tributed to the neg­a­tive cor­rup­tion record of T&T. Al­so, the col­lapse of in­sur­ance gi­ant Cli­co is no where free of blame. This is the strong view of chair­man of the T&T Trans­paren­cy In­sti­tute Vic­tor Hart, who be­lieves that while there were sev­er­al oth­er con­tribut­ing fac­tors, the cor­rup­tion al­le­ga­tions lev­elled against Ude­cott and mis­man­age­ment at Cli­co is what tar­nished this coun­try's record.

This coun­try slipped a fur­ther sev­en places down the Cor­rup­tion Per­cep­tion In­dex (CPI) lad­der from 72nd place, with a low score of 3.6. T&T is now ranked at 79 out of 180 coun­tries. This sur­vey is com­plied an­nu­al­ly by Trans­paren­cy In­ter­na­tion­al, and ranks politi­cians and pub­lic of­fi­cials who are per­ceived of be­ing cor­rupt. "It is dif­fi­cult to know what we are do­ing wrong. The CPI is per­cep­tion op­posed to ac­tu­al cor­rup­tion. This is a wake up call be­cause the re­al­i­ty is where there is smoke there is fire. There is need for re­search to be con­duct­ed to as­cer­tain the ex­tent of the per­cep­tion and match it to what is re­al­ly tak­ing place in re­al­i­ty.

"What I sus­pect is that the many al­le­ga­tions that came in­to the pub­lic do­main sur­round­ing the UFF Com­mis­sion is what could have se­vere­ly af­fect­ed our coun­try's rank­ing. We have failed to re­cov­er from the low CPI scores that we have at­tained for the past two years. The col­lapse of Cli­co and the bail out by Gov­ern­ment spurred lots of al­le­ga­tions of greed and board­room mis­man­age­ment. This im­pact­ed on the the cor­rup­tion per­cep­tion in T&T. In ad­di­tion, Hart said the col­lapse of the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion was an­oth­er con­tribut­ing fac­tor to the cor­rup­tion per­cep­tion to­wards T&T.

Hart ex­plained: "T&T ap­pears to be still per­ceived at the same lev­el of cor­rup­tion hence the rea­son there has been no move­ment with this coun­try's low score. "Since Feb­ru­ary 5 of this year our coun­try has been with­out an In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion. The In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion as stat­ed in the con­sti­tu­tion was set up to re­duce white col­lar crime. What are we say­ing with the col­lapse of the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion?" Hart said the con­tin­ued low CPI score for T&T was trou­bling when com­pared to oth­er Caribbean coun­tries. Bar­ba­dos placed 20th and their score rose to 7.4, an in­crease from last year where they at­tained 7.0. Al­so ahead of T&T are coun­tries like St Lu­cia, St Vin­cent, Cu­ba and Suri­name.

?T&T's scores:

2006–3.2

2007–3.4

2008–3.6

2009–3.6