There are still too many “black holes” in Spain’s anti-corruption efforts, David Martínez, executive director of NGO Transparency International in the Iberian country, told Euractiv’s partner EFE in an interview on Wednesday.
Spain has recently been rocked by a series of high-level corruption cases, such as the “Koldo case” involving Spanish parliament speaker Francina Armengol for being implicated in an alleged scheme involving kickbacks on the purchase of face masks during the pandemic.
However, these could have been prevented with verification instruments such as the “integrity pacts” Transparency International promotes worldwide, Martínez told EFE.
These “integrity pacts” are “voluntary contracts in which three parties” – public administrations, bidding companies and external auditors” – undertake to comply with a series of obligations and requirements “beyond the ordinary internal checks” in which a civil society organisation “acts as an independent monitor”, he explained.
In these pacts, the “observer” NGO, in coordination with Transparency International, exercises control over all contractual phases, from the drafting and launching of the tender to its execution, to monitor that all phases are correctly fulfilled and implemented, Martínez explains.
If “integrity pacts”—or similar control and transparency instruments—had been activated, the probability of situations such as the “Koldo case” or similar occurring would have been much lower, says the head of Transparency International in Spain.
To date, the Spanish branch of the NGO has signed ‘integrity pacts’ with Madrid City Council, the Generalitat of Valencia (north-east) and two with the Autonomous Community of Castilla la Mancha (centre-south), and aims to increase the number of such voluntary compliance agreements.
“Spain has a lot of ‘homework’ to do. The country gets a very fair grade, an ‘E’ in many aspects of the fight against corruption, although it has other strengths, including ‘the prevention and fight against systemic corruption and impunity,” Martínez asserts.
Of particular concern to the NGO is the minimal control over the declaration of assets of deputies and senators.
“Parliamentary transparency in Spain has a huge deficit. Deputies and senators’ declarations of assets and income tax do not meet the minimum requirements. He warned that the deputies’ declarations are published in scanned PDF format, far from any open and interoperable data standard”.
(Fernando Heller | EuroEFE.Euractiv.es)
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