Committee receives written response from ACC members

Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) have submitted their written response to the Parliament’s Independent Institutions Committee – which initiated a motion for their dismissal in early December. 

The committee, which has been working through recess to expedite the motion, gave members of the corruption watchdog five days to respond to the allegations against them in writing last week. The five-day period expired at 11:00 am Sunday. 

A committee member told Sun that all ACC members have sent their response in writing. 

ACC currently has three members; the commission’s president Mariyam Shiuna, vice president Fathimath Anoola, and Aishath Abdulla. All three submitted their response separately. 

The committee is scheduled to convene for a meeting at 04:30 pm to make its decision. 

The committee voted to initiate the process of dismissal all ACC members based on findings of a performance audit, which uncovered the commission had over 16,000 pending cases.  

The committee highlighted 10 main issues uncovered in the audit in its report.  

The committee said that while ACC completed investigations into 61 percent of corruption cases, only one percent of the cases were sent for prosecution.  

The committee said the commission had a huge backlog, and takes a long time to forward cases to the Prosecutor General’s Office even after completing investigations. They also said that a lot of the cases sent to the Prosecutor General’s Office were sent back to the commission.  

The committee said in its report that the pace of the commission’s work was unusually slow, and that many of the funds stolen from the state remains unrecovered. The committee found only MVR 11,000 in funds were recovered by the end of October. 

Two of the commission’s members – Ibrahim Shakeel and Ali Ashraf – had resigned after the committee began its review.