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Corruption risks have been identified in the field of environmental protection and the use of natural resources
28.09.2020 779 ViewsThe National Anticorruption Center has completed the institutional integrity assessment at the Inspectorate for Environment Protection and Agency Moldsilva, including the subordinate public entities. There have been identifies a series of corruption risks, such as: risk of passive corruption, abuses / abuse of office, risk of forgery in public documents, risk of professional negligence etc. The high probability of materialization of these risks is supported by regulatory and procedural deficiencies, incorrect application of anticorruption measures, as well as lack of professional integrity of the public agents with supervisory tasks and control responsibilities in the field of environmental protection and use of natural resources.
These aspects are confirmed by the integrity incidents in which environment inspectors and employees of the forestry enterprises were involved (33 criminal cases are under investigation of the NAC criminal investigation body in 2018-2020), but also the results of the professional integrity testing, used within assessment at these entities. Thus, according to the conclusion of Chisinau Court (Center headquarters) of January 28, 2020, were estimated with a positive result, confirming professional integrity, only 14 % of the IEP employees tested and 38 % of the employees tested in enterprises subordinate to Agency Moldsilva.
With the reference to the Inspectorate for Environment Protection, the analyzed integrity incidents denotes that some inspectors receive “rewards” in order not to register / document committed infringements, to incorrectly determine the amount of the fine (qualifying the act on committed under a different article/paragraph), to modify the status from a legal person into a natural person, to pay a lower fine. Regarding public agents from forestry enterprises, it is mentioned that they received undue financial means in order not to document intentionally identified forestry infringements, to introduce wrong data in the control and accounting documents, wood embezzlement from forest fund, the public property of the state etc. Thus, within the framework of professional integrity testing, the amounts of money received by environment inspector ranged from 200 up to 350 euros, and the sums received by foresters – from 600 lei up to 5000 lei.
Therefore, corruption factors from the normative and departmental framework, violation of fundamental principles of the state control, poor management of the guard of the forest fund, fueled by personal and by a group of public agents’ interests, failure to ensure institutional integrity climate – encouraging and increasing the probability to materialize corruption risks in the environment field, with the creation of premises for systematic corruption.
To eliminate the found deficiencies in the assessed entities, a series of recommendations were provided, the managers being obliged to adopt an integrity plan, which implementation will be monitored by the NAC.
Reports on the results of the institutional integrity assessment can be accessed at:
https://cna.md/lib.php?l=ro&idc=83&t=/Evaluarea-integritatii-institutionale/Rapoarte-de-evaluare/Rapoarte-privind-rezultatele-evaluarii&