This July 18 picture shows protesters, with placards reading ‘Let’s cut corruption’ and pictures of PP
general secretary Maria Dolores de Cospedal and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, on their way to the headquarters of the PP in Madrid.
Spain has slumped 10 places to a rank of 40 in a global index of perceived official corruption after a spate of scandals in its ruling centre-right party and the royal family, watchdog Transparency International (TI) said.
In its 2013 Corruption Perceptions Index, the anti-graft organisation said that Spain was the second biggest loser of points alongside Gambia, Mali, Guinea-Bissau and Libya.
The only country to tumble further was Syria, rocked by civil war.
Spain’s five-year economic slump, which has forced it to adopt tight austerity laws, exposed how cosy relations between politicians and construction magnates fed a disastrous housing bubble.
The former treasurer of the governing People’s Party (PP, also transliterated as Popular Party) told a judge that he had channelled cash donations from construction magnates into leaders’ pockets, and he was found to have 48mn euros in Swiss bank accounts.
The king’s son-in-law, Inaki Urdangarin, was also charged this year with embezzling 6mn euros in public funds.
“What the economic crisis has done is allow more public debate about corruption ... It is being exposed more and that affects perceptions. In Spain every sector – politics, the royal family and companies – was implicated in graft at a time when the country is really suffering,” said Anne Koch, TI’s director for European and Central Asia.
The scandals also highlighted a lack of accountability in political parties and even the watchdogs charged with keeping them clean.
This prompted lawmakers to react to public outrage and draw up Spain’s first freedom of information law.
Spain had been the only European Union nation without a law guaranteeing citizens a right to information on how public funds are spent. Koch said the new law was still inadequate.
TI ranked 177 countries in 2013, placing New Zealand and Denmark joint first.
The duo were also deemed the world’s least corrupt in 2012, alongside Finland. Somalia, North Korea and Afghanistan tied at last place, unchanged from last year.
The Berlin-based institute measures perceptions of graft rather than actual levels due to the secrecy that surrounds most corrupt dealings.
It uses a scale where 100 stands for the most clean and 0 for the most corrupt.
Greece remained the European Union state with the highest perceived level of corruption, although its four-point gain to 40 points helped it rise to 80th place from 94th in 2012.
The biggest improver on points was Myanmar, which emerged from 49 years of military rule in 2011. The southeast Asian state gained six points, taking it to 157 from a previous 172.
Among the major global economies, the US ranked 19 and China 80, both unchanged from last year, Russia improved slightly to joint 127th place, from a previous 133 and Japan slid one spot to 18.
Allegations that leaders of Spain’s PP, including Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, took backhanders and the investigation into a member of the royal family are particularly damaging to Spain’s reputation as they involve such central institutions, according to Fernando Jimenez, lecturer in political sciences at Murcia University.
“The problem in Spain is the political reaction ... very few people resign here,” he said.
He contrasted the Madrid government’s slow response to the illegal financing scandal in the PP with Germany, where cabinet ministers stepped down after much less serious allegations that they had plagiarised their academic theses decades earlier.
That crisis-hit Greece has taken steps to fight corruption while Spain is dragging its feet on tackling bribery is “one of the most interesting issues for us”, Finn Heinrich, lead researcher of The 2013 Corruption Perceptions Index, told AFP.
“You see two quite different responses to corruption in the context of economic crisis, and I think it bodes much better for Greece’s prospects then for Spain’s.”
“The last couple of years both of them went down because of the eurozone crisis, which revealed the corruption was one of the contributors to the crisis but also exacerbated it,” said Heinrich.
“But this year for the first time Greece is getting better, and I think it shows the government is tackling corruption head-on there. There have been high-profile prosecutions, they have put in place somebody working closely with the prime minister who is co-ordinating anti-corruption activities.”
Heinrich said that “this is not happening in Spain, quite the opposite”.
“More and more scandals are getting revealed and the government is not seen as taking those seriously. And those scandals even involve very high-level government people.”
“The biggest scandal right now is funding of the governing political party by high-level business interests, particularly those in the construction sector.
“There is the link to the euro-crisis because obviously construction was one of the key bubbles in Spain which then showed that this growth pattern and economic pattern of the country was not sustainable.”
Heinrich cited as one example a major corruption case centred on the Spanish resort of Marbella that led to scores of convictions.
“The mayor of the city ruled it as its own fiefdom, where he basically, together with big construction companies, ignored the building laws and got money for expanding the city way past what was legally allowed,” Heinrich said. “That’s just one example, and there are many, many more.”
The fact that more than two-thirds of countries are corrupt will hinder economic recovery, as well as the fight against poverty and climate change, TI warned in its report.
Of the 177 countries included in the survey, 69% scored below 50 points on the watchdog’s corruption perceptions index.
“The (index) demonstrates that all countries still face the threat of corruption at all levels of government, from the issuing of local permits to the enforcement of laws and regulations,” said watchdog chief Huguette Labelle.
She warned that even nations with good corruption records face problems when it comes to the abuse of power in the public sector.
“The better performers face issues like state capture, campaign finance and the oversight of big public contracts which remain major corruption risks,” Labelle said.
“Future efforts to respond to climate change, economic crisis and extreme poverty will face a massive roadblock in the shape of corruption,” the watchdog added in its 19th annual report.
The watchdog called on international organisations such as the G20 economies to crack down on money laundering, to increase corporate transparency and to pursue the return of stolen assets.
“It is time to stop those who get away with acts of corruption. The legal loopholes and lack of political will in government facilitate both domestic and cross-border corruption,” said Labelle.
