SA THE FRAUD CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

Oh Dear! It was bound to happen though, and the question that we need to ask, is "Why is anyone surprised?"

Crime, in any form will never be controlled if there are no or very little consequences for one's actions. Neither does it help when the perception is that there are a set of rules for one lot of people (read government and the wealthy) and another set of rules for the rest (read John Doe of Joe Public).

Corruption and fraud needs to be dealt with fairly and across the board. People who do the crime, need to understand that there is a consequence, irrespective of where they come from, what they do for a living and how much money they may or may not have in the bank.

Regards
Nikki



May 19 2006 at 11:42AM


By Dominique HermanCorruption creates an inextricable link between finance, politics, society and the economy which, in turn, directly threatens national security, according to the head of South Africa's elite commercial crime fighting unit. "Things are bad here," said Leonard McCarthy, head of the Directorate of Special Operations, commonly known as the Scorpions. He added, however, that the country was not in the "quagmire" as many believed.
McCarthy was speaking on the second day of an Africa conference on economic crime in Cape Town on Thursday, attended by local corruption investigative heavyweights such as the National Director of Public Prosecutions, the head of investigations for the SA Reserve Bank and the Auditor General. He judged the level of corruption in the country by the frequency of corporate collapses, disputed contracts and liquidations, among other measurements.
Earlier, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) deputy chief executive Stanley Subramoney attributed the South African propensity for drafting good documents but not being too good at implementing them, to our colonial history and the resultant mindset that we needed an external party to do things for us. "As Africans, we do not believe in ourselves," Subramoney said. Billy Downer, chief prosecutor in the Schabir Shaik trial, said afterwards that the significance of petty, "simple" corruption could not be underestimated as it occurred more frequently than the instances of grand corruption exposed on the front pages of newspapers. The good news was that those crimes were being prosecuted regularly in the magistrate's and regional courts. According to the PwC 2005 Global Crime Economic Survey, presented at the conference the day before, South Africa was found to have the highest reported incidences of fraud by companies among the 34 countries surveyed. At the top of the list was asset misappropriation, linked to the aforementioned "simplistic" crime, such as the theft of laptops, cellphones, and the abuse of company resources.
o This article was originally published on page 6 of Cape Times on May 19, 2006