of police and is supervised by a high-ranking prosecutor from the court of appeals. The directorate is responsible for all crimes committed by police personnel, including corruption, and following the broadening of its powers, it is now empowered to investigate acts of bribery and extortion by any public officer. These include employees of the ministries, public agencies, municipalities, prefectures, tax inspectors, and so on. Only port authority employees are excluded, since the relevant ministry has its own internal affairs directorate. Unlike other anti-corruption authorities in Greece, including the GIPA, the directorate primarily has a penal function, while the others are mainly administrative.
The directorate investigates complaints, which can be anonymous, but may also act independently (for example, on inside information). The investigations are conducted secretly but with caution so as not to harm the reputation of wrongly accused public officers. Several of the 2003 cases were brought against tax inspectors who had been specifically assigned to combat corruption in the field of taxation. Several scandals relating to them had led to frequent public questioning of ‘Who will control the controllers?’ Their investigation by the Directorate of Internal Affairs is of major importance, not only in answering this question, but in preventing future corruption. Markella Samara (TI Greece)
Further reading TI Greece: www.transparency.gr Note 1. Council of Europe Group of States against Corruption (GRECO), ‘Evaluation Report for Greece’ (2002).
India Corruption Perceptions Index 2004 score: 2.8 (90th out of 146 countries) Conventions: UN Convention against Corruption (not yet signed) UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (signed December 2002; not yet ratified) Legal and institutional changes • The Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) bill became law in September 2003. The law permits inquiries into corruption offences alleged to have been committed by certain categories of public servants. The legislation came in response to a 1997 recommendation by the supreme court to increase the independence of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and other investigative bodies that probe high-level corruption by transferring supervision of the CBI from the government to the CVC. The CVC law, however, fails to give the CVC a strong mandate. The law restricts the CVC’s supervision of the CBI and
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