ANCHORMAN

What is the point of declaring assets?

ML NATTAKORN DEVAKULA

The Constitution requires that all members of Parliament (MPs) and ministers disclose their assets and liabilities to the National Counter Corruption Commission (NCCC) upon coming to office, immediately after leaving office, and also a year later.

The documents the above-mentioned politicians have to file with the NCCC include a 33-page official form (they have a new version up - for politicians who do not regularly check the NCCC website) and related certified copies of documents meant to prove that what has been filled out in the forms is indeed true.

I tried putting this whole task together last week just to see what it was like for the 480 MPs and 36 cabinet ministers forced to go through this tedious task. It took me pretty much the entire week. Typing in the form is one thing; that is not too bad. But the real effort was spent trying to track down how many bank accounts I had. Yes, that includes even ones with very little money in them. The time-consuming, or shall I say time-wasting, task was getting all these account books updated. However, that is where the fun ends.

Because next I'm supposed to track down all the land that I own - plots that I bought on my own, and the ones my parents bought me (these include plots I am aware of and those I was not). Getting an authentic valuation from the Land Department so that I could notify the anti-graft body is also another headache. This latter task meant having to search through a host of websites, or doing several walk-ins over at the Land Department offices in all the different districts where my real estates are located. You can call, but that way you wouldn't get the real, certified documentation required.

Don't give up on me yet, I'm not finished. How about the next challenge of figuring out how I'm supposed to know the total amount of shares that I own in both non-listed and listed companies? Just the other week, I found a shares-ownership certificate in an old drawer. It was from when my parents purchased some equities for me when I was a teenager.

For those who live in the real world, where the ownership of shares is a very normal and mundane practice not to be seen as always rife with conflicts of interest, making a summary of all the equities you own and figuring out the value, and then having a securities firm issue statements to support these conclusions, is nothing less than a completely ridiculous undertaking.

All that took me a week. I've not even begun to count the bottles of wine, jewellery, rugs (I hear Persian rugs are popular among politicians these days), Rolexes (or maybe it's classier to wear Patek Philippe), nor have I gotten my house and car re-valued so that the figures are updated. I'm sure that I've left out many other insignificant items in this very tedious - yet of no real anti-graft value - obstacle which all politicians must face.

By the way, if you are married you have to repeat the process all over again for your spouse (another reason to stay single). Seriously though, for the husbands or wives out there, unless you have been married for some 30 or 40 years, are you supposed to even know all the above-mentioned details of your significant other? What if the person you love ends up omitting the fact that he or she had at one time purchased more than 5% of a company's shares? Why is one person's action supposed to be responsible for killing the career of another? That boggles the fair-thinking, legal mind.

It is senseless, stupid and uninspiring to believe that forcing politicians to disclose their total assets and liabilities will in any way, shape or form lead to a decline in corruption. It is further beyond my wildest imagination how the result of this time-killing and headache-causing exercise could help the NCCC investigate graft carried out by ministers or MPs.

First of all, the Constitution stipulates that politicians can hold more than 5% shares of a business entity so long as they disclose it and temporarily block it from being moved or managed by placing the shares at a securities firm. That means the shares return to their rightful owner after leaving office anyway. Therefore, it serves no purpose to forbid ownership in the first place.

Second, the NCCC's organic laws already prohibit a minister from having his own firm pursue a business transaction, involving a concession, with the agencies or departments of which he is in charge of. Making the disclosure to the NCCC is immaterial because realised conflicts of interest and under-the-table dealings would be investigated on a case-by-case basis. The declarations become too superficial in a real-life investigation a la the style of the Assets Scrutiny Committee.

Further, which dumb, corrupt politician would in his right mind place the millions of baht in bribe money - if taken - into accounts whose details would be disclosed to the NCCC? The process of assets disclosure itself eliminates the possibility of authorities being able to venture in to catch the thief with his hand "in the cookie jar". This means that had it not been for the assets being made public, some of these politicians would be placing much of the corruptly earned dough into their real accounts, in which case the NCCC could covertly investigate even without the account owner's knowledge. Converting the difference in levels of money placed in the accounts, over time you might just be able to figure out how much that politician has been "taking". This latter trick is rendered impossible under the current rules in place, where everyone reports all that they have. If you are going to be on the take, you are going to simply place the under-handed funds earned into undisclosed accounts, safety box deposits, or valves somewhere.

Ask yourself: who would knowingly declare exorbitantly higher levels of assets upon leaving office, unless the increase in their savings came through legitimate means?

The ritual of reporting how much money a politician possesses has its negative externalities as well. It strengthens the sense of inequality in society, especially when some of these men and women are filthy rich. It facilitates a sense of loathing inside the hearts of those who happen to be overly envious of wealthy people.

Financially dichotomous pockets of society should not be pitted against one another for the sake of wanting to expose public figures through gratuitous transparency.

At the end of the day, making the assets disclosures public, even when an MP or a minister has not even carried out a single violation of the law, becomes - in and of itself - a violation of the individual's normally inviolate financial status. If the Constitution does not force the NCCC to do this, in other more personal-rights oriented legal culture, all politicians would be suing the NCCC for exposing a person to financial harm.

I suppose that some of you may not be aware that if I were an MP right now, you could find out the branch location, number and name of the account of all my commercial bank deposits. If that's not a monumental and purposeless invasion of privacy, and a simple exposure to being robbed, I don't know what is.

Thailand is a country where ownership rights must be protected. Property (land deeds, equities, bonds, deposits, etc) purchases are encouraged as part of the norm in a free-market capitalist economy. Yet nowadays more than ever, politicians are discriminated against by a set of legal practices which do not necessarily help fight the war on corruption.

Article 261 of the current Constitution forces the NCCC to violate the personal right to privacy and exposes politicians to financial harm, as it requires a public declaration of all assets to be filed with the anti-graft body. This article and a whole host of legal practices discourages good men and women from entering the political arena and poses a burden for people who simply want to represent their constituencies and their country. Worse, it facilitates the pernicious application of the law where simple mistakes and genuine omissions are seen as acts of non-compliance with the rules of the game, leading to perfectly decent ministers and MPs getting the axe. Even if all these rules are in place - which they should not be if the country desires a productive political scene - they should be implemented in a spirit of cooperation and mutual assistance, and not of sceptically catching politicians' mistakes.

Try declaring all your assets and (unless you own nothing) you will make a mistake. The governing apparatus of this nation will soon be without capable performers if we keep eliminating people by using legal loopholes with no genuine recognition of the integrity of the law.

The writer is a news analyst. Beginning next week, M L Nattakorn Devakula will be taking a break from this column to venture out on a four-month, personal, semi-political campaign.

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