Podgorica, 26 October 2010 – Transparency International, an organization fighting corruption in over 90 countries across the world, released today its yearly Corruption Perception Index (CPI) ranking. The CPI ranks 180 countries in the world according to their level of corruption on a scale from 0 to 10 (with zero representing the most corrupt countries).
Montenegro finds itself in 69th place this year, with a CPI score of 3.7, which represents a drop from last year (when it received a 3.9). In relation to other countries of the western Balkans, Montenegro lags behind Croatia and Macedonia, while it continues to rank higher than Serbia, Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina. What sets it apart from its neighbors, however, is that while all other countries in the region managed to maintain or improve their CPI scores in 2010, Montenegro is the only one that saw a decline in relation to its 2009 score.
Albania, Bosnia and Macedonia all improved their CPI scores, while Serbia and Croatia repeated their 2009 results.
Montenegro’s improved score last year was short lived, just as MANS predicted, since it was largely based on the fact that the country had received the EU Commission’s pre-accession questionnaire. This was perceived as an important step forward towards EU integration, which clearly influenced the global perception of corruption in Montenegro. However, we already knew then that behind the alleged political will to confront corruption there were no concrete results in the struggle against it. Nevertheless, this lack of concrete results didn’t prevent the Government from bragging that its alleged efforts were finally being recognized at the international level.
This year the situation is considerably different. The decline that Montenegro experienced in its CPI score is a direct consequence of its inability to produce concrete results and stems from a series of mistakes that the Government made over the course of the past year that further influenced the declining perception of corruption in the country.
These include the Government’s attempt to hide from its citizens the answers it gave to the EU Commission’s pre-accession questionnaire and the further clarifications requested by Brussels. It also includes the shameful adoption of a so-called “Strategy and Action Plan in the Struggle Against Corruption and Organized Crime,” with which the Government further demonstrated its lack of even the rudimentary minimum of political will necessary to implement key anti-corruption reforms.
Unfortunately, advances in the struggle against corruption in Montenegro are still being hampered by the catastrophic incompetence of precisely those institutions that should be the key pillars in the struggle against corruption and organized crime. Montenegro’s police, judiciary and prosecutors are still fixated on sanctioning low-level administrative corruption, thereby padding their statistics to show that the political will to confront corruption exists.
Nevertheless, investigations against the ‘biggest fish’ in the country are actually going nowhere, with senior representatives in the police and Prosecutor’s Office constantly resorting to their favorite phrase: “the investigation is continuing.” In this way the responsibility of those who made decisions in a range of failed privatization deals, illegal construction projects, fixing the outcome of tenders and money-laundering can continue to be sidestepped.
Montenegro’s poor ranking comes at a particularly sensitive moment as it awaits the Europe Commission’s opinion on its candidate status and the start of negotiations. Corruption and organized crime will remain key challenges for Montenegro on its path towards EU integration, which will increasingly depend on achieving concrete results in this domain. Political will cannot be demonstrated by rhetoric or fixing statistics alone, these will not hide the fact that Montenegro has yet conclude any high-level convictions for corruption.
Vuk Maraš
Director of the Monitoring Program
