Professor of Baku State University, Doctor of Law Kamil Salimov, spoke to our VK correspondent.
- If you want to succeed in fighting corruption you should have a proper legal base for it. And that’s a great amount of work, all non-governmental organizations for anti-corruption activities should be registered and the results of their work should be published on special web-sites as well as in papers.
Besides that, you’ll have to boost the efficiency of the administrative structures. It might prove a useful event to take the works of Marx and Lenin into account – I mean, not only the USSR profited from them, but all other countries. Economic planning might be the answer – in its most general sense. I think that in Azerbaijan it will be efficient if all organizations involved in the export trade should report back to government according to a yearly plan. This is the only way to eliminate the corruption hampering economic development.
Tax payments should also be reconsidered. The interest rate should be reduced to encourage people to submit fair tax declarations. The main income item (70-80%) of the Azerbaijani budget is oil and oil-based products. So we should make our money there while increasing social guarantees and reducing taxes in other branches of industry. The tax system should be simplified, and the number of bureaucrats responsible for it should be reduced.
The agricultural sector has its defects, too. We import some 80% of agricultural products. That’s why Heydar Aliev freed farmers from taxes, but I think that food production factories should be freed from taxes too. Control over imported products should also be more strict.
- The price of some imported articles of prime necessity increases considerably after customs payments. Is it possible to reduce the customs duty on these items?
- We should lift custom duties for primary products and equipment. For example, we should create more favorable conditions for fodder crops. We have strong monopolies in the livestock sphere, and this is harmful for farms’ development.
To make food prices stable we should create stable prices for raw materials and fodder crops. And planning might help.
- How should ordinary people behave when they face corrupt practices?
- We have opened the ‘Legal culture’ web-site, as the anti-corruption strategy stipulates. To fight corruption efficiently, society has to raise its legal awareness. If a citizen has encountered corruption they should address the proper organizations, because if one doesn’t fight for one's rights, then there’s no chance that the government will be able to track down every single corrupt bureaucrat.
Interview by Ramin Naziev, Baku. Exclusively to VK
