Controversial Saudi TV series attacks corruption

A popular Saudi Arabic language TV comedy which has triggered religious controversy has boldly hit out at corruption in the world’s dominant oil power in a new episode that was broadcast on Sunday, a local newspaper said.

“Tash Ma Tash” has already come under fire by Saudi Arabia’s top Muslim clerics, some of whom warned the public against watching the series that has been aired during the holy month of Ramadan for nearly 17 years.

Sunday’s episode was fully devoted to corruption in Saudi Arabia as it showed a journalist (Majid Fawaz) trying to expose corrupt officials and businessmen but they try to bribe him to buy his silence, according to Ikhbariat Arar online paper.

“Tash Ma Tash” struck at corruption tycoons in Saudi Arabia and there was a strong indication that government parties are involved in corruption,” it said.

“The episode showed a major known company winning contracts without submitting tenders for the projects…it showed that company was making billions of riyals every year from the state budget.”

According to the paper, the journalist was then sacked from his job after a telephone call from an important “personality” which threatened to “stop all advertisements with the newspaper unless that journalist is fired.”

“This in fact happens quite often in real life in Saudi Arabia and all journalists in the country are well aware of this fact,” the paper said.

Sunday’s episode of “Tash Ma Tash”, watched in most Arab states, also tackled malpractices by companies involved in providing public services and how “they could be disrupted if they hurt the interests of these companies which benefit some corrupt officials with large accounts in Swiss banks,” the paper said.

“Unusually, the writer of the series apparently did not want that episode to have a sad ending as the sacked journalist regains his job,” it said.

“He enters his office and salutes the portrait of the Custodian of the two Holy Shrines [King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud], in an apparent reference to the monarch’s instructions to prosecute the corrupt officials who had caused the Jeddah flood disaster… the writer appears to be hopeful that the country’s leadership is determined to strike at the corrupt officials and end all types of corruption in the country.”

Although it was a taboo word only recently, corruption is now debated in public in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil producers as part of ongoing economic reforms and social openness. Most regional nations have started to debate such issues in parliament and there have been several cases of interrogation of senior officials.

Saudi Arabia and its partners in the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have also created auditing bodies to watch public spending and ensure money is spent properly and there are no misappropriations of funds.

Over the past two years, Saudi newspapers have given expanded coverage to heated Shura (parliament) debates about corruption and abuse of public funds following recurrent Royal statements about the need to fight corruption in the Kingdom, the largest Arab economy with a population of 27.1 million.

Early this year, papers reported that the Kingdom’s state financial watchdog, the General Auditing Bureau (GAB), complained to King Abdullah that government offices are involved in illegal spending of public money while some are holding up projects and others do not comply with budgetary allocations.

GAB’s Chairman Osama Al Faqih also told the monarch that many pubic institutions have failed to heed a cabinet decision and set up in-house auditing units to ensure discipline and curb financial malpractices.

Faqih, a former Saudi minister of trade and ex-head of the Abu Dhabi-based Arab Monetary Fund, outlined seven major financial offences in his report to the Monarch, according to Saudi newspapers.

The policy turnaround in Saudi Arabia also followed intensifying moves to attract foreign investment and eliminate red tape and other malpractices for a better standing in the mushrooming global indices that measure nations’ progress.
 
 

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