President's Office extends deadline to apply for ACC membership

President's Office on Sunday extended the deadline to apply for the vacancies at the Anti Corruption Commission (ACC) - following the resignation of all five members of the Commission. 

Though initially applications were opened from January 5 to January 17, President's Office stated that the deadline has now been extended till 12:30 pm on January 31. 

The application form will be available from the reception of the President’s Office and could be downloaded from the official website of the President’s Office.

With the by-election for the Komandoo constituency looming closer, the opposition has been expressing concerns due to the lack of ACC members. 

Parliament’s Independent Institutions Committee decided in November that they would recommend the dismissal of members found to be underperforming following their review. Following its review – the Committee voted to initiate the process of dismissal of all members of ACC in early December as they uncovered the Commission had over 16,000 pending cases.  

On December 26, the Committee recommended a vote of no-confidence motion on the Parliament floor against the ACC members.

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

The remaining members; the commission’s president Mariyam Shiuna, vice president Fathimath Anoola, and Aishath Abdulla – tendered their resignation a day after the no-confidence motion was taken.

Independent Institutions Committee highlighted 10 main issues uncovered in the audit in the report formulated on their findings. In this regard, they said that while ACC completed investigations into 61 percent of corruption cases, only one percent of the cases were sent for prosecution.   

It was also noted that 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 also said in their report that the pace of the Commission’s work was unusually slow and that many of the funds stolen from the State remain unrecovered. On this note, it was found only MVR 11,000 in funds were recovered for the State by the end of October 2021.