The Vietnamese Ministry of Transport has suggested the government assign the Ministry of Public Security to cooperate with Japanese competent agencies to investigate an allegation that a Japanese firm paid over US$780,000 in bribes to win an official development assistance (ODA) project order, more than over $41 million, in Vietnam between 2008 and 2014.
>> Vietnam sets up team to probe alleged $780k bribery >> Vietnam demands 10 more report in $780k graft allegation>> Vietnam requests Japanese firm to name alleged bribe-takersThe Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported on March 21 that Tamio Kakinuma, the president of Japan Transportation Consultants, Inc. (JTC), admitted allegations that his company had bribed civil servants in Vietnam, Indonesia and Uzbekistan with ¥130 million to receive orders for five Japanese ODA-funded projects in these countries.
The total illegal payments were made on about 40 occasions from February 2008 to February this year, it revealed, saying that each payment was determined according to the value of each order.
The paper elaborated that JTC paid a total of ¥80 million ($782,640) in return for an ODA project order worth ¥4.2 billion ($41,088,600) in Vietnam, while the firm paid ¥30 million in exchange for three projects totaling about ¥2.9 billion in Indonesia.
In Uzbekistan, Yomiuri Shimbun said the Japanese company paid about ¥20 million to win an order worth about ¥700 million.
The company is believed to have paid the kickbacks to five government employees, including a senior official of an office responsible for project administration at Vietnam Railways Corporation and an official in a position of responsibility at the Directorate General of Railways at the Indonesian Transportation Ministry, according to the Japanese newspaper.
Vietnam has ordered 14 officials and ex-officials to write reports on their responsibility, with four of whom even being suspended, following this allegation.
A project to build the Yen Vien-Ngoc Hoi railway route in Hanoi is now under scrutiny.
The Southeast Asian country also sent a working team led by a Deputy Minister of Transport, Nguyen Ngoc Dong, to Japan from March 25 to 28 to seek official information from the Japanese side.
Dong met with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (MOFA) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and informed them of the Vietnamese government’s swift responses to the allegation.
The deputy minister also recommended the Japanese bodies to verify the media report, share information on their investigation, and cooperate with Vietnamese authorities in curbing corruption in the coming time.
MOFA said the Japanese parliament and people are paying scrupulous attention to this graft accusation, as it will be a very regrettable and serious incident that negatively affects Japan’s ODA policy if the report is proved to be true.
MOFA and JICA added that Japanese judicial authorities are looking into the alleged bribery so they can only release official information when there is a conclusion from competent agencies.
They suggested that Vietnam should crack down on the offenders once investigators have confirmed the graft.
In 2011 a Vietnamese official, Huynh Ngoc Si, was sentenced to two decades in prison for taking bribes from a Japanese company in association with a project to develop an avenue in Ho Chi Minh City, with funds coming from Japanese ODA, following Yomiuri Shimbun reports.
Si, former deputy director of the HCMC Department of Transport, was handed a life imprisonment sentence on October 18, 2010.
He then appealed against the verdict and an appeals court commuted it to 20 years in prison on September 1, 2011.
Đăng ký: VietNam News
