Supervisor of Elections, Mohammed Saneem

The Fijian Elections Office has this afternoon revealed that it is terminating a Memorandum of Understanding with Sweden based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

This is the result of a report by International IDEA on political financing in Fiji.

Supervisor of Elections, Mohammed Saneem says given the political nature of the report, the FEO can no longer maintain official links with the international body.

“Unfortunately this report appears to have placed overemphasis on the reactions of some political parties and used that as the penultimate source of information. An independent and apolitical research would obtain data from all sources, but verify and evaluate all before publishing it”.

The organization in response to questions from FBC News says by nature, any research on political finance is political, but stresses that its report on Fiji is not party political, nor leaning to any ideology.

International IDEA goes on to say that there is lack of significant literature on political financing in Fiji and in some cases, researchers referenced media reports.

It adds that Saneem was also provided an opportunity to review the draft report several weeks before publishing, but the FEO did not respond to that opportunity.

Saneem says it is not the job, nor the core role of the FEO to correct errors of other organisations.