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Parties' Polls Expenditure

EC sits on reports for over 3 yrs

Shakhawat Liton
The Election Commission has not taken any move in the last three and a half years to scrutinise the election expenditure reports submitted to it by political parties contesting the 2008 parliamentary polls.
Almost all the 39 political parties contesting the election, including Awami League, BNP, Jatiya Party and Jamaat-e-Islami, submitted incomplete expenditure reports. But none of them faced any action for non-compliance of electoral laws properly.
According to the Representation of the People's Order (RPO), the EC is legally bound to scrutinise the election expenditure reports of political parties.
Officials at the EC Secretariat said the possibility of the new EC's doing the job is very slim since it is getting busy with preparations for the next parliamentary polls.
Contacted, former election commissioner Brig Gen (retd) M Sakhawat Hussein said, "During our tenure, we could not scrutinse the political parties' election expenditure reports due to shortage of manpower and burden of work for holding a series of local government polls."
It needed to do some more work for scrutinising the expenditure reports, he said. "But we did not get that much time. Besides, there was a lack of procedure for doing the job."
Sakhawat, who was election commissioner from February 2007 to February this year, said they had proposed to change the RPO to introduce the required procedure.
"The present EC should develop the procedure to this effect," he added.
When his attention was drawn to this, Election Commissioner Shah Nawaz said, "Three and a half years have already passed, and the previous commission did not do the job. We are now busy with many urgent work "
He, however, said he would seek to know from the EC Secretariat what happened to the election expenditure reports.
The previous EC headed by ATM Shamsul Huda had, however, posted copies of all the reports on its official website as per laws.
Information available shows that of the four major political parties--Awami League spent Tk 3.60 crore, BNP spent Tk4.49 crore, Jatiya Party Tk 13.67 lakh and Jamaat-e-Islami spent Tk74.72 lakh for their electioneering.
The political parties' registration system was introduced for the first time before the previous parliamentary polls with the provision for submission of expenditure reports to the EC in efforts to bring transparency in the parties' income and expenditure. And
Expenditure ceilings of the parties were fixed considering the number of their candidates in the polls.
All the 39 political parties submitted their election expenditure reports within 90 days after the polls held on December29,2008.
Almost all of them however did no cite whether their election funds were deposited and maintained in any scheduled bank as per the electoral laws. They did not also mention how they had collected the funds.
It is, therefore, not clear if the parties had spent within their ceiling of expenditure or crossed that.
A political party may be punished with a fine up to Tk.10 lakh if it crosses the expenditure ceiling and does not maintain bank account.