PETALING JAYA, July 13 ― Putrajaya’s “see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil” approach despite an alarming survey on corruption will cause Malaysia to slowly suffocate from the menace, the DAP’s Lim Guan Eng said today.

On Tuesday, Transparency International Malaysia released the 2013 Global Corruption Barometer (GCB), which found that less than one in three local respondents felt the government was successfully combating the menace, down from 48 per cent from the 2011 edition.

A day before the GCB was made public, China gave former Railways Minister Liu Zhijun a suspended death sentence for bribery and abuse of power, the official Xinhua news agency reported, in a case seen as a test of President Xi Jinping’s resolve to crack down on pervasive graft.

“Unlike other countries like China, which is making slow but significant progress where ministers are sentenced to death for corruption, the Malaysian government continues to take an ostrich in the sand approach of ‘seeing no evil, hearing no evil and speaking no evil’,” Lim (picture), the DAP secretary-general, said in a statement.

According to the local result of the survey on the effects of corruption, 76 per cent of respondents viewed the police as corrupt, followed by politicians at 69 per cent.

Civil servants and public officials came in third in the survey, at 46 per cent, just ahead of Parliament, which was seen as corrupt by 44 per cent of respondents.

But the police force’s ignominy was not consigned to just the number of people considering it corrupt, as it also topped the charts on the extent of corruption. On a scale of one to five, with one considered “Not at all corrupt” and five being “Extremely corrupt”, Malaysian respondents gave the police a score of four, with politicians coming in just behind at 3.8.

But Lim noted that the continued refusal to form an independent police oversight body despite the scores given to the police force in the survey was indicative of the political will to combat corruption.

“Even the highest judges in Malaysia’s recommendation in the Royal Commission of Inquiry for the establishment of an Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC) to prevent police abuses and custodial deaths is rejected as unconstitutional by the home minister, a non-lawyer but with an ability to find creative and inventive excuses,” Lim added.

The Penang chief minister also took aim at the minister for integrity and transparency over his apparent defence against the findings.

“It is sad that former TI Malaysia president and now Minister in the Prime Minister Department Datuk Paul Low continues to be in denial by dismissing such a poor result by stating that corruption is a global menace and not peculiar to Malaysia,” Lim said.

Shortly after the survey results were released, Low pledged to take up the fight to beat the “menace” with the Cabinet even as public confidence in the country’s leaders was shown to be shrinking.

“Corruption is not just peculiar to Malaysia. The GCB results have made it clear that it is now a global menace that must be recognised and addressed before it is too late,” Low said in a statement then.

Despite alleging that the problem was “so ingrained within the BN political culture that it is said that ‘if corruption is not wiped out, Malaysia dies; if corruption is wiped out, BN dies’,” Lim offered to cross the political divide to help BN introduce the deep-cutting reforms that he said were necessary to prevent Malaysia’s wealth from continuing to be siphoned out illegally.

“The losses from corruption in Malaysia ranged from RM27 billion yearly to nearly a one trillion ringgit over the last 10 years in the form of illicit outflow of funds as estimated by Washington-based Global Financial Integrity Report,” Lim said.

“DAP is willing to work with BN to implement institutional changes to uphold integrity such as open competitive tenders, public declaration of assets by government leaders, full disclosure of government contracts signed with the private sector and a ban on family members of government leaders conducting business with the government.”

The 2013 GCB is the biggest ever conducted by the Berlin-based watchdog, with 114,000 people responding in 107 countries in the survey of opinions on corruption and which institutions are considered most corrupt.

TI is a global organisation that campaigns against corruption. It has 90 chapters worldwide and tries to raise awareness of the damaging effects of corruption and works to develop and implement measures to tackle it.