With a score of 33, Moldova was placed 117th out of 180 countries in the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) for 2018 that was launched by Transparency International in Berlin on January 29. The 2018 CPI draws on 13 surveys and expert assessments to measure public sector corruption in 180 countries and territories, giving each a score from zero (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). More than two-thirds of countries score below 50, with an average score of only 43, IPN reports.
Transparency International Moldova said the CPI reveals mainly the perception of usual, routine corruption. The informal usual sums paid annually by the population to representatives of state institutions are derisory compared with the funds stolen from the banking system in the banking fraud. However, the investigation of the theft of the US$ 1 billion in 2018 was delayed and the implementation of the recovery strategies suggested by Kroll and Steptoe&Johnson was thwarted. The end beneficiaries of the theft weren’t held accountable and no progress was made in recovering the stolen funds.
According to TI-Moldova, last July instead, the capital amnesty law that allows legalizing ill-gotten gains was adopted in secret. In January 2017, in its appraisal the National Anticorruption Center said the capital liberalization concept was equal to the concept of laundering ill-gotten gains. In 2018, when this concept was put into practice, the Center didn’t take the necessary measures. At the same time, in 2018 the provisions concerning the granting of Moldovan citizenship by investment were amended and these allowed transferring the duties to examine the files of applicants for nationality to private companies and hiding information about beneficiaries and their sources of livelihood, increasing the money laundering risks at international level.
The experts of TI-Moldova noted that even if a new law on the prevention and combating of money laundering and terrorism financing, which was to transpose the recommendations of MONEYVAL, was adopted, less than half of the recommendations were implemented, while others only partially. The authorities informed about the taking of legal action against separate doctors, initiating simultaneously a public-private partnership with an offshore company for the provision of dialysis services, creating a monopoly mechanism for tens of years and channeling hundreds of millions of lei in public funds to a non-transparent firm. These things reveal not the population’s perception of usual corruption that is shown in the CPI, but rather the upper-level corruption, including political corruption and capturing of state institutions for the benefit of a narrow group of interests.
Full democracies score an average of 75 on the CPI; flawed democracies score an average of 49; hybrid regimes – which show elements of autocratic tendencies – score 35; autocratic regimes perform worst, with an average score of just 30 on the CPI. Since 2012, only 20 countries have significantly improved their scores, including Estonia and Côte D’Ivoire, and 16 have significantly declined, including, Australia, Chile and Malta. Denmark and New Zealand top the Index with 88 and 87 points, respectively. Somalia, South Sudan, and Syria are at the bottom of the index, with 10, 13 and 13 points, respectively. The highest scoring region is Western Europe and the European Union, with an average score of 66, while the lowest scoring regions are Sub-Saharan Africa (average score 32) and Eastern Europe and Central Asia (average score 35).
