The practice of soliciting and offering commissions should not have existed in the implementation of any development project. It is now time to put a complete stop to all this.

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim said soliciting and giving commissions in the implementation of development projects, including housing projects, must all be stopped immediately. The PM insisted that the government had not prevented any company from operating and making profits, but the practice of offering commissions to any cabinet minister or political party should not have existed.

“If the company is making profits, no problem, but don’t cut RM10 million or 15 million (of the company’s profit) just for a minister or any political party as practised before. This is what damages (the system),” he said.

Indeed, such a practice should not have happened, whether the element of corruption exists in it.

“Commission” is a form of “cost” which will bring up the cost of a project, and the additional cost will eventually be transferred to the consumers or property buyers.

As such, the consumers or buyers must never think that what the prime minister said has nothing much to do with us because we may have already paid a price for such an aberrant practice. The so-called “commission” should have been spent more usefully elsewhere, such as to benefit the consumers by lowering the operating cost and hence, the selling price.

The prime minister must be commended for laying bare the issue and calling for a complete halt to such an unhealthy practice. But more importantly, the root causes must be identified and appropriate actions taken to stop it from going on further.

Being a customary practice means such thing has been in existence for quite some years, and has evolved into an unspoken rule that needs no further elaboration or implication.

The question is, what kind of environment has provided the required condition for such an “unspoken rule” to thrive? Is it because of the red tape in application procedures or lack of transparency in the whole process? Or because of the grey area in the implementation or abuse of power? If such a commission is not required, what makes the companies or developers willingly hand out commissions to the tune of tens of millions?

It is imperative that the authorities review the entire procedure, streamline it, enhance the transparency of its implementation, and clarify all ambiguous grey areas to make sure all development projects are subjected to fair and equal assessment. As long as everything goes as per the standard procedures, all factors of uncertainty will be eliminated, and no “unspoken rules” will ever get the go.

Sure enough the so-called customary practice or unspoken rules have been accepted as a norm, and reversing it takes time and is not easy by all means. The government will need to take solid actions through multiple approaches in order to check this unhealthy practice.

The issue of political funding should also command the attention of the government. Right now this country still lacks any law to control political donations and because of that, any “commission” can become justified if it is relabelled as “political donation”, and  indeed we do have prior instances of political leaders implicated of receiving bribes acquitted after the court ruled upon appeal that the sums involved were political donations.

To completely wipe out commissioning, the government will have to first draw a distinct line so that there will be no grey areas where such “unspoken rules” get to thrive.

The G25 group of Malay elites has earlier urged the cross-partisan parliamentary committee on political funding to reach a consensus as soon as possible in order to table the bill in parliament.

Unspoken rules have been around owing to a lack of distinct and explicit rules as well as transparency. To resolve this problem, formulating of transparent and explicit rules and regulations is absolutely essential.

The practice of soliciting and offering commissions should not have existed in the implementation of any development project. It is now time to put a complete stop to all this.