Ben Lowry: Corruption destroys societies but for now it’s a reality in much of the world

Micheal is a regular contributor to our pages and has sent readable reflections on events, some based on his travel in the old Soviet Union.

In today’s letter (see link below) he raises the matter of the culpability of bribe payers, based on a comment I made in my column a fortnight ago (‘My memories of visiting a Ukraine that seemed part West, part Soviet,’ February 26, see link below).

I did not have room in that article to give more information on my rather comical but also somewhat ugly experience of crossing from Ukraine to Moldova to Transnistria.

I said in the article that my journalist colleague and companion lost his passport, perhaps when we were distracted by the saga when a first set of pro Russian officials detained us for no good reason, but in fact it was possibly stolen by them too. Another official who arrived, I seem to recall with other men in an estate car and wearing semi military garb, threatened to take us to a “camp”.

I have been in a similar situation once, driving to a ferry in a country which has a lot of corruption. I transgressed a traffic violation without knowing it, was stopped by a policeman who found something wrong with my paperwork (car insurance, etc) and threatened to impound the car. He really wanted a payment (40 euros). That is how the law operates in some nations. Some people might on principle allow themselves to be detained, perhaps for days, but those who don’t and pay up are not at all comparable to people who initiate a bribe payment in order, for example, to get drugs.

In the West we rightly view corruption with contempt – it destroys the rule of law. I hope that one day the rest of the world will be like that, but sadly it is far from being so.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor

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