14th IACC Conference - Opening & First Impressions

[Evgeny Ivanov Kossev]

Hello and greetings from Bangkok. I'm Evgeny Kossev and I'm a delegate at the 14th IACC Conference settled in this city of both luxury and poverty. After the registration passed the conference was opened and the prime minister of Thailand has the floor in order to say "Hello and Welcome" to all the 1500 participants that had come. He also put the main question in this session: "How can we fight corruption?". From all the things that he said only one really impressed me: "THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS GOOD CORRUPTION!". The second spokesperson was Haruhiko Kuroda. He is a presided of the Asian Development Bank and he was intensely looking for partnership from national, regional and global institutions in fighting against corruption. His keywords were that "THE VOICE FOR CHANGE MUST BECOME LAUDER!". Immediately after that fallowed strong sentences said by the managing director of the World Bank - Sri Mulyani Indrawati. She said that she was a new member of the WB and her position showed her how much the WBI has been done against corruption. She ended her speech telling that corruption was not invented by the poor.
When a few more persons talked about things such as the massive increase of wealth, the insecurity of the ordinary people, the corruption and its damage to the human rights, fallowed a couple of questions from the audience. I personally was really disappointed from one of the answers. On the question "How the government will protect the young people from corruption and its consequences", the prime minister of Thailand just said that he was aware of the fact that youths are suffering from it.
To sum up I'd like to say that the beginning of this event gave us a lot of questions and no answers. "Do we have the proper mechanism to fight against money laundering?" ; "Can we use the IT technologies in order to investigate very rich people and to avoid illegal enrichment?". I really hope to find proper answers during this conference and to have all solutions of the problems caused by the huge amount of corrupted people.