The watchdog Transparency International’s recent reports said that the Nordic countries are facing growing corruption. According to The Local Sweden, the low corruption levels are in past.
The recent banking scandals, money laundering and even bribery cases have set several black spots on the reputation of the Nordic countries, says the statement of the Nordic chapters of Transparency International.
“The Nordics’ reputation for good governance and business integrity is repeatedly being challenged”, a joint statement reads.
Te most powerful violations against the financial system were previous scandals within the Nordic banks, including suspected money laundering through Swedbank and Danske Bank.
TI’s report also highlighted recent reports that an Icelandic fishing conglomerate has bribed Namibian public officials, while money for the scheme was transferred through a Norwegian bank.
In order to fight against corruption, Transparency International said policy-makers and business communities in the Nordics needed to “take a hard look at what their public and private sectors are up to, wake up to their responsibility, and live up to their good reputation or lose it”.
The anti-corruption body strongly believes that the Nordic states are able to fix the errors. The important condition for this might include harder policies aimed at detecting and investigating corruption. Additionally, several changes to the law should be done, the government’s enforcing those laws already in place, as well as protecting whistleblowers is a must.
World Corruption Index has changed a lot in 2018
In the 2018 Corruption Index, Denmark was ranked as having the lowest perceived levels of corruption worldwide, while Sweden and Finland were ranked third, Norway seventh and Iceland 14th. Greenland is not yet included in the scale.
Normally, the index ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption according to experts and businesspeople, using a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean.
