Saakashvili back to repeating his false claim about corruption

December 23, 2009 by georgiamedia

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It has been almost a week since we last noticed him saying it, but Mikheil Saakashvili has again returned to telling his favourite tale - that Transparency International have judged Georgia to be the world's number one fighter against corruption in the last five years.

Earlier today, in an interview with the pro-democracy station "Echo of Moscow" (Эхо Москвы) he said:

"we are the best fighter against corruption on a global scale according to Transparency International. For 5 years no other country in the world has achieved more progress than Georgia."

(мы первый борец с коррупцией в мировом масштабе согласно Transparency International. За 5 лет ни одна другая страна в мире не достигла большего прогресса, чем Грузия.)

Let's rehearse the facts and not the fiction here again:

• Transparency International have made no such statement
• Transparency International reject the methodology used to make this statement
• Even if we accepted Saakashvili's methodology he's still got it wrong - Dominica has seen a bigger improvement than Georgia over the last five years on TI's "Corruption Perception Index".

Why this matters is that while Georgia has indeed solved many of the small scale petty corruption problems that plague everyday life in many parts of the post-Soviet space, at the highest level there are clear signs that the state is more or less as dishonest, rotten and corrupt as ever - and every time Saakashvili repeats his bogus claim he is giving himself an excuse for doing nothing about it.

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