行贿受贿，腐败成风
Grease my palm
贿赂我吧
Nov 27th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Bribery and corruption have become endemic
行贿受贿，腐败成风
RUSSIA may not have democratic elections or the rule of law, but it does have one long-standing institution that works: corruption. This has penetrated the political, economic, judicial and social systems so thoroughly that is has ceased to be a deviation from the norm and become the norm itself. A corruption index compiled by Transparency International gives Russia 2.1 points out of ten, its worst performance for eight years and on a par with Kenya and Bangladesh. Ordinary Russians are well aware of this, with three-quarters of them describing the level of corruption in their country as “high” or “very high”.
俄罗斯也许没有民主选举或者法治制度，但却的确有一个悠久的传统：腐败。腐败已经深深地渗透到俄罗斯政治、经济、法律及社会系统的方方面面中，以至于腐败已经不再被看作是对社会规范的背离，腐败本身已经成为了社会规范。在一项由“透明度国际”组织出具的腐败指数中，俄罗斯获得了其8年以来的最差得分2.1分（满分10分为最廉洁），与肯尼亚、孟加拉国在一个档次。普通俄罗斯市民对此有十分清醒的认识，有四分之三的俄罗斯人认为其国家腐败程度为“高”或者“非常高”。
The size of the corruption market is estimated to be close to $300 billion, equivalent to 20% of Russia’s GDP. INDEM, a think-tank that monitors and analyses corruption, says 80% of all Russian businesses pay bribes. In the past eight years the size of the average business bribe has gone up from $10,000 to $130,000, which is enough to buy a small flat in Moscow.
腐败市场的规模估计接近3000亿美元，相当于俄罗斯GDP的20%。据俄罗斯智囊团INDEM的监测分析，有80%的俄罗斯企业行贿。在过去的8年中，商业贿赂平均值从$10,000.00上涨到$130,000.00，这已足够在莫斯科购买一套小的公寓。
A businessman who was stopped by the traffic police in Moscow recently was shown a piece of paper with “30,000 roubles” written on it. He refused to pay and asked the policeman why he was being asked so much for a minor offence. “The answer was that the policeman had bought a flat for his mother in Bulgaria and he now needed money to do it up,” the businessmen said. Far from being a taboo subject, corruption is discussed openly by politicians, people and even the media—but it makes no difference.
一位商人最近在莫斯科被交警扣住，交警向他出示了一张写有“30000卢布”的纸条。商人拒绝交钱，并问交警为何他要为如此小的违章付如此多的钱。“那是因为这个警察刚刚在保加利亚为他母亲买了一套房子，现在需要钱来装修。”这位商人解释说。腐败问题并没有成为一个禁忌话题，政府官员、普通民众甚至媒体对此都可以公开讨论，但这没有任何意义。
Corruption has become so endemic that it is perceived as normal. Opinion polls show that the majority of Russians, particularly the young, do not consider bribery a crime. The Russian language distinguishes between “offering a reward” to a bureaucrat for making life easier for you, and the brazen (and sometimes violent) extraction of a bribe by a bureaucrat.
腐败变的无处不在，市民对此已经熟视无睹。有调查问卷表明，俄罗斯大部分人，尤其是年轻人，并不将受贿视为犯罪。“提供报酬”给某一官员来让自己的日子过的舒服些，跟官员无耻的（有时候还用暴力的）强行索要贿赂，在俄语的表述中是存在区别的。
Small and medium-sized businesses suffer the most. Dmitry Golovin, who owns a tool-leasing company in Yekaterinburg, explains: “You go to the local administration to get permission for something and they send you to a private firm that will sort out the paperwork for you, which happens to be owned by their relatives.”
中小型企业对此感受最为深切。Dmitry Golovin在叶卡捷琳堡拥有一家工具租赁公司，他解释说：“你去当地的管理部门申请某些事情的许可，他们就会让你去一家私人公司，让这家公司替你整理申报文件，其实这家公司是由官员的亲戚开的。”
What are we going to do about this?
我们对此该怎么办？
The reason for the persistent corruption is not that the Russian people are genetically programmed to pay bribes, but that the state still sees them as its vassals rather than its masters. The job of Russian law enforcers is to protect the interests of the state, personified by their particular boss, against the people. This psychology is particularly developed among former (and not so former) KGB members who have gained huge political and economic power in the country since Mr Putin came to office. Indeed, the top ranks in the Federal Security Service (FSB) describe themselves as the country’s new nobility—a class of people personally loyal to the monarch and entitled to an estate with people to serve them. As Russia’s former prosecutor-general, who is now the Kremlin’s representative in the north Caucasus, said in front of Mr Putin: “We are the people of the sovereign.” Thus they do not see a redistribution of property from private hands into their own as theft but as their right.
腐败如此顽固，不是因为俄罗斯民众有行贿的遗传因子，而是因为国家政府仍然将国民视为其奴隶臣子，而不是国家的主人。俄罗斯执法者的工作是为了保护国家政府的利益不受普通民众的侵害，利益的具体代言人则是执法者们特定的上司。这种心理尤其滋生于过去的（也并不算是过去的）克格勃成员中，自从普京入主后，他们在这个国家攫取了巨大的政治、经济势力。甚至，俄联邦安全局的高层都将自己视为国家的新贵族——他们个人只对国家元首效忠，是有资格享受被人服侍的阶层。俄罗斯前检察总长，现克里姆林宫在北高加索的全权代表，曾在普京面前说：“我们都是元首的人”。因此他们并不将财产从私人手里转移到他们手里的再分配视为偷窃，而是视为他们的权力。
The precedent was set by the destruction of the Yukos oil company in 2003-04. Mr Khodorkovsky, its then owner, was arrested at gunpoint in Siberia and after a sham trial sent to jail where he has spent the past five years. Yukos was broken into bits and, after an opaque auction, passed to Rosneft, a state oil company chaired by Igor Sechin, the ideologue of the siloviki.
2003-2004年Yukos（尤科斯石油公司）的毁灭成为此类先例。霍多尔科夫斯基，Yukos当时的所有者，于西伯利亚，在枪口下被捕。然后经过不公正审判，他被投入监狱，并在那里度过了过去的5年。Yukos被碾为齑粉，在一场不透明的拍卖后，被出让给了Rosneft（俄罗斯石油公司），一家国有石油公司，董事长是Siloviki（西罗维基）的空想家，伊戈尔•谢钦。
Tricks of the trade
交易骗局
Mr Khodorkovsky was accused, among other things, of selling Yukos’s oil through offshore trading companies to minimise taxation. So now Rosneft sells 30-40% of its oil through a Dutch-registered trading firm, Gunvor, whose ownership structure looks like a Chinese puzzle. The rise in Gunvor’s fortunes coincided with the fall of Yukos. A little-known company before 2003, Gunvor has grown into the world’s third-largest oil trader, which ships a third of Russia’s seaborne oil exports and has estimated revenues of $70 billion a year.
霍多尔科夫斯基受到多项指控，其中一项指控其通过境外贸易公司销售Yukos公司的石油来逃税。而现今，Rosneft有30%-40%的石油通过一家名为Gunvor的贸易公司来销售，这家公司的注册地是荷兰，但是其所有制结构却是个谜。Gunvor的崛起正好伴随着Yukos的败落。2003年以前Gunvor还是一家名不见经传的小公司，现如今已成为全球第三大石油贸易商，俄罗斯石油海运贸易中有三分之一由该公司出口，其年收入据估计有700亿美元。
One of Gunvor’s founders is Gennady Timchenko, who sponsored a judo club of which Mr Putin was honorary president and worked in an oil company that was given a large export quota as part of a controversial oil-for-food scheme set up by Mr Putin during his time in St Petersburg. Mr Timchenko says he was not involved in the deal and his success is not built on favours.
Gennady Timchenko是Gunvor的创建人之一，他曾赞助了一家柔道俱乐部，普京是该家俱乐部的名誉主席。在普京任职于圣彼得堡期间，他曾发起过颇具争议的石油换食品计划，而Timchenko当时所在的石油公司则从该计划当中获得了大份石油出口配额。Timchenko说他当时并未参与此项交易，自己的成功也并不是建立在别人的恩惠之上。
The Yukos case changed the logic of corruption. As INDEM’s Mr Satarov explains, before 2003 officials simply took a cut of businesses’ profits. After Yukos they started to take the businesses themselves. These days businessmen pay bribes as much to be left alone as to get something done. They call it a “bribe of survival”.
Yukos事件改变了腐败的形式。据俄罗斯智库INDEM的Satarov分析，在2003年之前，官员们只是简单的从企业所得中分一杯羹。而在Yukos 事件之后，他们开始越俎代庖，自己插手经济。近来，商人们行贿不再单为办成事儿，而更是为了防止被乱插一脚。他们称此为“生存的贿赂”。
This new form of corruption is changing the structure of the Russian economy. “Yeltsin-era corruption ended in a privatisation auction, even if it was a fake one. The new corruption ends in the nationalisation of business,” says Yulia Latynina, a writer. Nationalisation is not quite the right word, however, because sometimes state property is quietly transferred into private bank accounts. And even where a business is formally controlled by the state, the profits or proceeds from share sales may never reach its coffers.
新型腐败正在改变俄罗斯经济的结构。一位名叫Yulia Latynina的作家说“虽然这场拍卖是虚假的，但它是叶利钦时代腐败的终结，而新型腐败的终结是商业国有化。”然而国有化并不是一个十分确切的描述，在有些情况下国有资产被暗中转移入了私人账户。而且即使这些企业是由国家控股的，其股票销售收益也可能永远都没有计入国库。
When Mr Medvedev was chairman of Gazprom, a state-controlled gas giant, one of his first jobs was to oversee the return of assets which had been siphoned off under the previous management. But as Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov, two opposition politicians, explain in a recent book, “Putin and Gazprom”, in the past few years Gazprom’s control over its multi-billion-dollar insurance company and part of its pension funds has passed to a private bank called Rossiya, controlled by Yury Kovalchuk, who is thought to be a friend of Mr Putin’s. The bank advertises itself as “Rossiya: the country of opportunities”.
梅德韦杰夫曾经是国有天然气公司Gazprom（俄罗斯天然气公司）的董事长，上任伊始，他的首要任务之一就是监督上一届管理层归还侵吞的资产。然而正如反对派人士Boris Nemtsov和 Vladimir Milov在其新书《普京和Gazprom》中所说，在过去的几年当中，Gazprom项下的价值数十亿美元的保险公司以及其部分抚恤基金已经转移到一家名叫Rossiya的私营银行名下，这家银行由Yury Kovalchuk控制，他被认为是普京的朋友。该银行这样宣传自己：Rossiya, 机遇的国度。
A necessary evil?
无法避免的灾难？
Both Mr Medvedev and Mr Putin condemn corruption in public. In a recent speech Mr Putin grumbled: “Anywhere you go, you have to go with a bribe: fire inspection, ecologists, gynaecologists—everywhere. What a horror!” Mr Medvedev’s first presidential promise was to fight corruption for the Russian public, and recently he thundered: “We have to do something. Enough of waiting! Corruption has become a systemic problem and we have to give it a systemic answer.” Soon afterwards he appointed himself head of a new anti-corruption committee.
梅德韦杰夫跟普京在公开场合下均对腐败发表过谴责。在最近发表的一次演说中，普京曾经抱怨说“不管你去哪里，你都要随身带好钱，（去做）消防检查，（去见）生态学家，（去看）妇科医生，所有的地方，这太糟糕了！”梅德韦杰夫当选总统后首先承诺要为了俄罗斯大众跟腐败做斗争。他最近对腐败发出恐吓：“我们必须要做些什么了，我们已经等的够长了，腐败已经成为系统问题，我们需要系统的去处理它。”此后不久他任命自己成为新反腐败委员会的领导者。
Mr Satarov says this may be more than just populism. “They feel that the system has become unmanageable. They also need to protect and legalise the wealth they have accumulated in the previous five years—hence all this talk about building a legal system.”
Satarov说这或许已经超越了单纯的民粹主义。“他们感觉到整个体系已经变得难以处理。同时他们还要保护5年以来所积累的财富并使之合法化，在此基础上才能讨论建立法律体系的问题。”
As a former lawyer, Mr Medvedev has started with legislation. A new draft law requires bureaucrats to declare their own and their family’s income and assets. But there are a couple of loopholes. First, the information about their income is confidential and available only to other bureaucrats. Second, the family is defined as spouse and under-age children—but not siblings, parents or grown-up children. “It is as if the government is telling everyone which accounts they should transfer the money into,” says Elena Panfilova, head of Transparency International Russia.
律师出身的梅德韦杰夫首先从立法开始着手。一项新的法律草案要求政府官员需申报其自身以及家庭成员的收入及资产。但这存在众多漏洞。首先，官员的收入信息对外保密，只对其他官员开放。第二，家庭成员的范围是：配偶或者未成年的子女。并不包括父母、兄弟姐妹以及成年子女。俄罗斯透明度国际的领导人Elena Panfilova对此评理说：“这好像是政府在教大家应该如何转移资产一样”。
The trouble is that corruption in Russia has become a system of management rather than an ailment that can be treated, explains Ms Latynina. Central to this system is the notion of kompromat, or compromising material. “It is easier to control someone if you have kompromat on them, so that is how a boss often chooses his subordinates,” she says.
Latynina女士认为困难在于腐败已经成为俄罗斯管理体系的问题，不再是料理食物那么简单。这个体系的核心是Kompromat,或者说是污点材料。她介绍说：“如果你有某人的污点材料，那么你可以很容易的控制他，很多老板都是这样来选他们的下属。”
The only way to fight corruption, explains Ms Panfilova, is through political competition, independent courts, free media and a strong civil society. Those things may not get rid of it, but at least they would establish uncorrupt norms. Yet fighting corruption from within the Kremlin would require the skills of a Baron Münchhausen, who famously escaped from a swamp by pulling himself up by his own hair. As Mr Khodorkovsky said in a recent interview: “The fight against corruption is a fight for democracy.” The interview cost Mr Khodorkovsky 12 days in solitary confinement. But the cost to Russia of allowing corruption to flourish is a lot higher.
Panfilova 女士认为，对付腐败的唯一途径就是通过政治竞争、独立法庭、自由的媒体已及一个强大的公众社会。这样或许无法彻底根除，但是却能够建立一个廉洁的规范。或许克林姆林宫战胜自身的腐败需要向著名的拜伦•蒙乔森（Baron Munchhausen）学习,他深陷沼泽中却通过拉自己的头发脱身。像霍多尔科夫斯基在最近的采访中说的那样，“与腐败斗争就是为了民主而斗争”这次采访导致霍多尔科夫斯基付出12天单独监禁的代价。但对俄罗斯来说，放任腐败横行的代价有些高。
俄罗斯军方检控官怀疑海军军官企图经塔吉克斯坦向中国偷运30枚导弹，总值1千8百万美元。
Sent to you by 参考消息 via Google Reader:
Things you can do from here:
- Subscribe to BBCChinese.com | 中文网主页 using Google Reader
- Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites
--
鹅是一个兵，来自老百姓
鹅不是老大，天才是老大
您无所不谈，鹅也不例外
鹅是参考消息@无所不坛
janadabc.blogspot.com
墙内请用谷歌阅读器订阅
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
您收到此信息是由于您订阅了 Google 论坛"参考消息(G4G)"论坛。
要在此论坛发帖，请发电子邮件到 Go2group@googlegroups.com
要退订此论坛，请发邮件至 Go2group+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
更多选项，请通过 http://groups.google.com/group/Go2group?hl=zh-CN 访问该论坛
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
没有评论:
发表评论