Upadate:
Police in Vietnam have arrested four railway officials in a probe into allegations a Japanese firm paid massive kickbacks to win a railway contract in Hanoi, local state media said Wednesday.
The deputy director general of Vietnam Railways, Tran Quoc Dong, was arrested for “failure to carry out responsibilities causing serious consequences,” Tuoi Tre newspaper said.
Three other senior railway officials were taken into custody for abusing their power, the report said, without specifying when they were detained.
In March, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported that the head of Japan Transportation Consultants, Tamio Kakinuma, 65, admitted to prosecutors that an ¥80 million bribe was paid to officials at Vietnam Railways for Hanoi’s overground rail link worth ¥4.2 billion.
The amount was part of ¥130 million his company had paid to civil servants in Vietnam, Indonesia and Uzbekistan to win work tied to projects funded by Japan’s official development assistance (ODA).
Vietnamese authorities vowed to investigate the issue thoroughly and punishment for anyone found guilty.
Japan remains communist Vietnam’s largest ODA donor with a pledge of $2.6 billion last year.
In December 2008, Japan suspended ODA to Vietnam for four months during a similar scandal that led to a 20-year jail term for the deputy head of Ho Chi Minh City’s transport department. The official was accused of taking up to $262,000 in 2003 from Tokyo-based Pacific Consultants International in connection with a major infrastructure project — a highway linking the east and west of Ho Chi Minh City — backed by Japanese aid money.
Vietnam is still rated one of the world’s most corrupt nations. Communist Party leader Nguyen Phu Trong on Monday called for a serious punishment over corruption as it remained “a challenge and society’s most urgent problem.”
To defuse public anger over the issue, the nation’s leadership is desperate to show it is tackling graft. The one-party state has been rocked by a number of high-profile corruption scandals in recent years, with graft and huge debts at giant state-run companies accused of fueling the country’s economic woes.
Reference: Japan Times
Retrieved from: Vietnam arrests railway officials in ODA graft scandal tied to Japan | The Japan Times
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My response:
I do seriously hope that the Vietnamese Leadership will continue in tackling graft and corruption. If Japan is to invest $2.6 Billion into Vietnam, then Vietnam must prove to Japan that it will not reiterate similar cases seen in 2013 and in 2008. Personally, we Japanese are very serious when it comes to business contractual agreements , transparency and trust is critical for us. If you are transparent with us, and prove it , you will gain the confidence of Japanese.