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After peaceful elections Ivory Coast must build on its commitments to fight corruption

On 25 October Ivory Coast went peacefully to the polls in the first election since bloody violence erupted in the aftermath of the 2010 presidential election. The incumbent Alassane Ouattara will remain in power. Our main concern is that any new government understands that to maintain stability it must strengthen the institutions that provide security, […]

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Northern shadows: Norway doesn’t always practise what it preaches

Norway regularly features near the top of rankings for quality of governance, health and education, including Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. In 2014 it was ranked by this index as the fifth cleanest country in the world, out of 175 countries. It is one of the few resource-rich countries that have managed to escape the resource curse, […]

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Middle East and North Africa: a region in turmoil

Three out of the bottom 10 countries on Transparency International’s 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index are from the Middle East and North Africa. Two of these three are in the midst of gruesome civil wars where lives are being lost daily. Iraq and Libya tell a story of a region in turmoil plagued with geopolitical insecurity, […]

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Moldova: time to tackle corruption

Moldova is a small land-locked country of 3.5 million people in the heart of Europe and, amid all the turmoil in neighbouring Ukraine, we will be going to the polls on 30 November. Given our position, our large Russian-speaking population and our dependence on Russian gas, this election may determine how far Moldova can progress […]

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No impunity: the law steps in to investigate

It’s getting harder for Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue to keep getting away with it. The son of the long-serving president of Equatorial Guinea has been forced by the US government to forfeit his cliff-top Malibu mansion, a rare Ferrari and several life-size Michael Jackson statues, all said by the US Department of Justice to have […]

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Libya’s Top 5 Corruption Scandals

Renewed factional fighting in Libya has claimed more than 150 lives in the past two weeks. The oil rich country is on the verge of becoming a failed state with a powerless central government. This is the haunting legacy of Muammar Gaddafi’s corrupt regime that has left the country in a state of constant violence […]

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Inside Ukraine’s protests

Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, has been racked by protests, the largest since the 2004 Orange Revolution when the country rose up in response to fraudulent presidential elections. Thousands of people have been occupying Kiev’s main square since last November and more recently, government buildings. The varying reports on the reasons for the violence and the range […]

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Money up in the air? Corruption in Yemen’s gas sector

Hundreds of Yemenis protested on the streets of Sanaa against the government’s ongoing negotiations with French oil company Total about the pricing of liquefied natural gas (LNG), which is one of the main sources of the country’s wealth. Protestors claimed that Yemenis have lost hundreds of millions of dollars of potential earnings from the country’s […]

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African Renaissance comes through the reinforcement of institutions

The African Union (AU) celebrates its 50th anniversary on 25 May with an extraordinary summit in Addis Ababa, under the theme “Pan-Africanism and African Renaissance”. The AU as it has been known since 2002 is the successor to the Organization of African Unity founded (OAU) on 25 May 1963 when 32 recently independent African countries […]

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Iraq’s corruption legacy

$800 million. That’s the staggering amount of money said to be unlawfully transferred out of Iraq every week. Last month marked the ten year anniversary of the start of the occupation of Iraq by coalition forces. The aftermath of war and occupation has been ravaging well after the withdrawal of foreign troops. The US Special […]

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