Our View: There needs to be collective political will to clean up politics

The golden passport saga took a new twist on Thursday, when an Akel deputy revealed at a House committee meeting that five foreign nationals had made donations to ruling party Disy totalling €205,000 after they had been granted citizenship. On Friday, Christos Christofides added another four foreign donors with Cyprus passports to the list, with total contributions amounting to €60,000, and asked for an investigation.

Letters were sent to the commissioner for transparency and the auditor-general. He asked the former to investigate if there were irregular dealings with regard to these contributions and if they were linked to the council of ministers’ decision to grant citizenships. The auditor-general was asked to confirm the veracity of the data, to provide information about the donors and to investigate if there were irregular dealings in relation to the contributions. Diko also demanded explanations as well as an investigation by the newly-established anti-corruption authority.

This does not look good, even though Disy issued an announcement saying that everything was done by the book. “All donations to Disy were received in accordance with the provisions of the law – which incorporates the guidelines of GRECO – and with full transparency as they were posted on the website of the party from the first moment,” the party said. The fact the donors were posted on the Disy websites enabled Christofides to make the links to the granting of citizenships.

Still, having the party that is part of the government receiving donations from individuals who were granted citizenship by that government raises questions, even if everything was in line with the law governing party contributions. Anyone could speculate that citizenships were granted on the understanding that contributions would be made to Disy, even if this was not necessarily true, which could be seen as corrupt practice. Then again, nine individuals out of 3,517 investors, who were given passports, making contributions to Disy does not suggest there was a government policy for diverting funds to the party.

At least Disy did not try to conceal the contributions, which is the standard practice with regard to donations made to parties by Cypriot individuals and businesses. There is however a broader issue which neither Christofides nor Diko dared to touch on – the lack of transparency in the funding of parties, which no party is prepared to address. Despite paying lip service to the need for transparency, we have seen no party attempt introduce it to their funding; this is an issue on which they are united.

When the issue was raised several years ago, the parties cited one basic argument against transparency – identifying donors would discourage them from funding parties – which, essentially, highlighted the problem. The only reason a donor would not want to be identified was because they could be done a favour by a party they contributed funds to. Neither the party not the donor would want suspicions of a quid pro quo to be in the public domain. More importantly, this would suggest that individuals and business contribute to parties in order to extract some direct advantage in the future. This is a form of corruption, and the fact it happens in most countries is no defence for preserving it.

Staying on the subject of political funding, is there transparency with regard to the finances of the campaigns of presidential candidates? Are there accounts properly scrutinized after an election or does the audit depend solely on information provided by the candidate, who can decide what to declare? One presidential candidate for these elections cleverly announced that his campaign would rely on crowdfunding, which is a very effective method of avoiding transparency. Nobody is going to check the individual contributions in a crowdfunding campaign.

The real problem is that the political will to introduce transparency with regard to the funding of parties and presidential candidates does not exist. Both parties and individual politicians view the issue of transparency on funding as a nuisance rather than an obligation, doing the absolute minimum they have to in order to pretend they support it. The submission of a capital statement, which is an obligation of politically exposed persons (PEP), has always been treated as a joke, politicians avoiding completing the forms properly or, dare we say, truthfully. An indication of how seriously politicians take this obligation, was the fact that 50 PEPs failed to submit a capital statement by the August 31 deadline.

There could well be substance to Christofides’ claims against Disy but suspected dubious dealings and corruption will not be effectively tackled by making an issue out of it only when one party can score points against another. There needs to be collective political will to clean up politics, through tight legislation on party funding and PEPs’ capital statements that is strictly enforces. Only the politicians can do this but they do not seem to be ready yet.