Initiatives of Change - Detailed view of For A Change Articles

Sir Jack Cater, KBE, JP, makes you feel immediately at home. At the mention of Hong Kong his well-lined face lights up, and he is hard to stop. Although unmistakably British-, for him Hong Kong is `we', and Britain `you'.

He has at one time or another been in charge of Defence, Commerce and Industry, Home Affairs and Information in the Hong Kong Government. From 1978 to 1981 he was the Hong Kong Government's Chief Secretary. But above all his name is associated with the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) of which he was the first Commissioner, from 1973 to 1978.

Despite Hong Kong's remarkable achievements in other fields, no administration had succeeded in efforts to deal with the corruption that thrived in its crowded streets and harbours. Anti-corruption drives were launched in 1897, 1948 and 1959. Yet by 1970, 70 per cent of news stories about Hong Kong in the British press concerned corrupt practices.

At the heart of it were corrupt elements in the 27,000-strong Hong Kong police force. They shared in profits from drug trafficking, gambling and prostitution. The going rate for a police officer to turn a blind eye to a traffic offence was well known. Within the force, people paid thousands of dollars for appointments to beats where good protection money could be extorted from shopkeepers. Corrupt earnings at the height of the problem were reckoned at HK$4,000 million in today's money.

At the time, Cater says, there was a lack of urgency about the problem. Some expatriates claimed it was an inevitable part of Chinese culture. `A certain amount of corruption helps oil the wheels of commerce' was a common view.

Then Chief Superintendent Peter Godber came under internal police investigation. It was found that he had salted away overseas HK$3.4 million - six times his total salary over 20 years' service. Public opinion demanded a prosecution. Suddenly Godber slipped the country. The people of Hong Kong were furious.

Responding to public demand, Governor Sir Murray MacLehose ordered the settingup of the ICAC. It started work in February 1974 under Cater's command.

Robert Klitgaard of the University of California reports: `Between 1974 and 1975 the ICAC investigated 2,466 corruption complaints. The number of cases brought to trial increased from 108 in 1974 to 218 in 1975. Godber was returned and convicted in early 1975. From February 1974 to October 1977 the ICAC arrested 260 police officerson corruption charges... syndicated corruption had been broken.

`The ICAC did not eliminate corruption in Hong Kong. But the scale was nowhere near what it was before. The police force had been cleaned up.'

Cater is at pains not to personalize this success. He ascribes much of it to the ICAC's carefully conceived structure, independent of but not ignorant of the police force itself, and to his able team of officers, who were well supported and financed. But it was not just a triumph of organization.

Cater and his wife had to endure some social hostility at first, and the occasional anonymous threat. But outweighing all this was the enthusiastic - `sometimes almost embarrassing' - support of the Hong Kong people. Cater and the ICAC won their trust and relied on them for both political support and information.

At first there were anonymous tip-offs. But confidence grew as it became clear that the ICAC was not itself becoming corrupt - a fate that had overtaken most previous anticorruption agencies. More and more people signed their reports and agreed to be interviewed.

`Did ICAC's wide powers of search and arrest and its ability to ask private citizens how they got the money to support their lifestyle constitute a suspension of democratic rights?' I asked. Cater denied this with vehemence, pointing out that the salaries of Hong Kong civil servants are a matter of public record. An honest person has nothing to fear from such a law, he maintains. Also, while the ICAC can make arrests, it cannot prosecute; that is the responsibility of the Attorney General.

The Government of New South Wales, Australia, partly modelled its own anti-corruption agency on the ICAC. So could it be applied anywhere? `Not quite,' says Cater. The one absolute condition for the success of such a formula, he suggests, is that the authorities must themselves be able to live with the truth. Otherwise, they cannot afford an ICAC with teeth.

For Cater the ICAC's achievement is not that it has abolished corruption but that it is still respected and popular today, and still doing its job. Recently it has been instrumental in bringing charges against the former Chairman of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Ronald Li.

An innovative aspect of the ICAC is described in its annual report for 1976 - as well as an investigatory arm, the Commission has a department dedicated to removing opportunities for corruption and a community relations department `for the tremendous task of changing public attitudes towards corruption'.

The continuation of the ICAC is written into the draft of Hong Kong's post-1997 Basic Law. An article in the Ming Pao Daily News a few days after the bloodshed in Beijing referred to `bureaucratic profiteering' on the mainland as a 'blood clot in Hong Kong's commercial operations'. `While we cannot reach out to the mainland to combat it,' the article continues, `we have here in Hong Kong an ICAC that will still be alive and kicking in eight years' time.'