Printer-friendly versionSend to friendPDF version

Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili has repeated a claim about what anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International that the organisation itself has already condemned as at-best "partly true" and at worst "misleading" and in any case based on figures now more than a year out of date.

Speaking today the president first of all attacked Transparency International for not rating Georgia's fight against corruption highly enough: "I think that their estimation is still unobjective, because [Georgia] made much more progress than they portrayed it".

But paradoxically then went straight on to say that TI had rated Georgia as the best in the world: "even they acknowledge that we are number one in the world in fighting against corruption".

In fact, TI do not recognise Georgia as "number one in the world". After these claims were first made, on the same day in late October on the Imedi and Rustavi 2 television stations, TI issued a detailed rebuttal which said:

"Imedi commented that Georgia is the first in the world in terms of fighting corruption, and Rustavi 2 reported that Georgia has made the most progress. This is partly true: between 2003 and 2008, Georgia’s score improved significantly. Difference between its 2003 and 2008 scores are higher than for any other countries included in the 2008 CPI [Corruption Perception Index - a TI annual publication].However we have to take in consideration the fact that states which are in the first ten places have comparatively high, nearly maximal grades and they also had high grades in the past years, thus they simply could not go ahead Georgia with speed of increasing grades and size. Currently, there are 66 other countries that are less corrupt than Georgia, including Cuba (65), Turkey (58), Poland (58), Kuwait (65) and Hungary (47). Ghana and El Salvador have the same ranking as Georgia (67). Armenia ranks number 109th and Azerbaijan ranks 158th. The most corrupt country, Somalia, is 180 and the least corrupt countries are Denmark, New Zealand and Sweden.

"Lastly, TI-Georgia would like to draw attention not only to Georgia’s ranking in the CPI, but also to its raw score. In 2008, Georgia scored 3.9 out of 10. The emphasis on a country’s ranking can be misleading because the list of countries included in the CPI changes from year to year, and one country’s ranking depends on the performance of other countries."

In addition they stated "Rustavi 2 stated that in terms of progress, Turkey, Czech Republic, Romania and South Korea are far behind Georgia. It is unclear how this conclusion was made. In terms of the CPI ranking and raw score, Turkey is ahead of Georgia. However, Georgia is ahead of many countries in terms of increasing its scores between 2003 and 2008 (however using this criteria would not be proper as it would be unfair to compare Georgia to other countries, which are on different historical timelines)."

Perhaps more interesting than the issue of the accuracy and relevance of Saakashvili's comments is that the fact he said it adds to the evidence that the erroneous stories broadcast by Imedi and Rustavi 2 and all such similar stories are manufactured not in the news room, or even in the Interior Ministry, but in the President's residence itself.

Additionally, these claims were made about the 2008 CPI. The 2009 index has now been published and shows that Georgia's continued relative improvement had slowed - it is now ranked 66th least corrupt compared to 67th in 2008. Under the new figures Dominica, in the Caribbean, has had a faster increase in its score (ie has been seen to improve more rapidly) than Georgia. Georgia still has the fastest improvement in score if the base year remains 2003: however, as the video here suggests, such comparisons are generally to be avoided.

IACC Athens: A Users' Guide to Measuring Corruption from Jonathan Werve on Vimeo.