The Party and the State have exerted great anti-corruption efforts but there remained shortcomings in the process of corruption-related asset recovery and the number of corruption cases detected and handled remained negligible, heard a workshop in Hanoi on September 21.
At the workshop entitled “Strengthening mechanisms for asset recovery in Vietnam’s anti-corruption legislation”, Vo Van Dung, a member of the Party Central Committee (PCC) and permanent deputy head of the PCC Central Committee of Internal Affairs, said that corruption-related asset recovery was one of the most important solutions to remedy harmful consequences caused by corrupt acts to the society.
The participants agreed that the limited recovery of corruption-related assets was attributable to inadequacies of the legal system. The enforcement agencies still lack legal grounds for proving the origin of assets acquired through corrupt practices as well as regulations prohibiting officials’ acts of receiving large-value gifts and illicitly making fortune, they said.
Current regulations on declaration and control of personal assets remained inappropriate and ineffective and lacked a mechanism for handling officials whose additionally acquired personal assets have no clear origin and are untruthfully declared, they added.
To improve effectiveness of the corruption-related asset recovery, participants suggested issuing more specific procedures for recovery, adding measures of freezing bank accounts of corrupt officials as soon as their violations are detected through inspection or audit, and applying more judicial remedies in the handling of corruption cases.- (VLLF)
