 We need to show that corruption is a punishable offence, that there are repercussions for it, not against journalists but against the people who are guilty of the crimes and in that way begin changing the culture too because I have to say that it's also a cultural problem. It's my pleasure to welcome today's panelists, the audience in the room and of course our viewers online to our press conference corruption and democracy. Today we'll be discussing really the key findings of Transparency International Corruption Perception Index and getting some feedback and context in specific countries. Today I'm joined by Delia Ferreira Rubio, Chair of Transparency International, Dr. Mugwitzi Masisi, President of the Republic of Botswana and Matthew Karawana Galizia, Director of Daphne Karawana Galizia Foundation. Welcome. First let's start with the report. It was just launched. Delia could you please share with us the key findings and really the surprises in that ranking. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you for joining us. The Corruption Perception Index is an instrument that we have been running for more than 20 years from Transparency International and we have launched it today. It's an index on perceptions of academic experts and business sector on the corruption in the public sector of countries. We are not measuring here money laundering, illicit financial flow, asset recovery or things like that. Just public sector corruption. We use 13 sources and we have measured 190 countries this year. On a scale that goes from 100, which means perceived as very clean to zero, perceived as very highly corrupt. And I will tell you the best performing countries and also those at the bottom. But what is important is that we are not just making numbers of these. We are correlating these results with certain aspects of governance of rule of law and other characteristics of our democracies. And there is a clear correlation repeated year after year between corrupt countries and weakened political institutions or a weak rule of law, lack of trust in institutions, the undermining of democracy. This correlation is clear. Corruption means this. We are not talking about casual things. We are talking about things that correlate. And this year we incorporated another factor which is the influence of big money in politics and the correlation between campaign financing, regulation and enforcement and corruption or transparency. And there is a clear correlation between countries where corruption is high and the regulation is not existent or is weak in terms of campaign finance or money in politics or you have good rules but very bad enforcement of that rules. This correlation is clear. The best performing countries and the average, the global average this year in the scales 100 to zero is 43 so there is no great improvement globally. And the best performing countries are Denmark and New Zealand, Finland, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland and those at the bottom part of the index are Venezuela in Latin America, Yemen, Syria, South Sudan and Somalia. And of course there are in each region well performing countries and I really have to thank the presence of President Massisi because Botswana is the yellow country. If you see our map we have yellow for the countries that are clean or perceived as clean and transparent and the red means corruption. And in the sub-Saharan region the only yellow spot is Botswana so congratulations for all your efforts. You can find all the material in transparency.org and you can find detail analysis region by region. The countries that have performed better in each region and one other thing that we incorporated this year is the relation or the responsibility that countries that are performing well in terms of the index and their responsibility in global corruption because the money that is stolen in the countries perceived as corrupt ends in banks and fortunes and luxury things in the countries that are seen as transparent. So corruption is a global problem and has to be tackled by the global community as the manifesto 2020 says this year we need collective action and stakeholders approach if we are going to stop corruption. I will leave it there. President Massisi, Delia reflected on how Botswana is this shining yellow dot on the map. Could you share with us your views on Sub-Saharan Africa's performance and more specifically on the fact that Botswana ranked second in the region and 34 globally. What is Botswana doing right? Well thank you very much. I guess it's a matter of interpreting an objective result rather than an act of kindness on that part to suggest that we're doing well. So I will take that back with me home and really thank the institutions and all the citizens of Botswana for doing this but we remain dissatisfied. Our fight against corruption is a race to a finished line that never ends. So it does not mean there is no corruption in Botswana. There is corruption but you've got to be dynamic in responding by plugging the holes to that corruption. Botswana exists not in isolation. We are part of Southern Africa. We are part of Africa. We are part of the global community and the very fact that we could attempt as much as we have to extricate ourselves of negative influences speaks a lot to our governance where democratic country and democracy is incomplete without transparency without accountability and so we do get held accountable for what we do. But we also in government do play a part as we have done recently when in the perception of many corruption seem to be growing or those who are perceived to be corrupt seem to be getting our way scored free. And so we closed a big hole a gap. We passed legislation law which requires all political leaders right from my level those National Assembly and Council all senior public officers and those in the judiciary to declare publicly their assets and their liabilities. We put in place these are very recent developments. We put in place a directorate of integrity managed in the office of the president for the simple reason that it's supposed to bear its influence on other institutions of the state. And the judiciary is responding likewise by they have a dedicated judge or anti corruption and we hope they will increase the number of judges that are dedicated to that. We've also passed a number of other pieces of legislation such as protection of whistleblowers and amended the corruption piece of corruption and economic crimes act to tighten the loose ends because we keep learning from what we do but it's corruption is multifaceted. They are the motivators of corruption and they are the actors and then they are the beneficiaries. You always would have in a third world developing country like mine actors who often act in cahoots with players who apply their trade and residence in countries that are not in Africa and who reside or citizens of countries that are perceived to have very low level of corruption. And so I think it is time particularly for transparency international to take the bull by the horns and let's start following tracking reporting on those who benefit from corruption. You know international piracy which is amounts to is a system whereby you tolerate the extortion exhortation of funds resources from a state to another state and then you legitimize it because you discovered that they're not democratic and not respecting human rights and you seize the assets of such. This behavior needs to stop because it continues to marginalize developing countries and finally I would have expected these chairs to be packed with people who are all in the value chain of corruption and they're missing because anti-corruption is a means though not complete or enough sufficient to realization of their SDGs. You cannot, you never will realize your SDGs or your development challenges. However developed or sophisticated you are when corruption continues to persist at the levels that it does and a lot of it you know is to do with poverty and equity no clean water pollution environmental mismanagement etc. So because we will subscribe to these good values we do it because it's the right thing to do for development. Thank you. Thank you. Before we move on to the question I'd like to invite Matthew to talk about the fact that Malta has significantly declined in the CPI. It's dropped six points since 2015. Can you explain to us what has contributed to this decline and classification of Malta as a country to watch? Okay perhaps for for people who aren't aware of why I'm here exactly my mother was an investigative journalist investigating corruption in Malta who was murdered in 2017 and that murder did not happen in isolation it wasn't an isolated attack. It happened specifically because Malta's government chose to go in the exact opposite direction of for example Botswana's government and practically adopt corruption rather than anti-corruption as a as a policy and when when a government chooses to do this because it is a choice then that automatically puts journalists who investigate corruption in great danger and leads to murders which is why my mother was murdered. That started I suppose with with the election to government of our former prime minister. Malta already had weak institutions to begin with but the the government's program of privatization selling passports granting licenses to banks from Iran just fomented more corruption and as journalists like my mother began to publish evidence of this corruption instead of fighting fighting that corruption fighting those crimes the government doubled down and began to take measures to decapitate the authorities and institutions of the state that are supposed to be fighting that corruption so things just got worse and worse once the government did that in order to protect people in government in order to protect corrupt officials it opened up the door to more transnational organized crime and eventually things went into a spiral of decline which is why Malta's ranking has continued to fall and why it continues to be a country to watch. Now our way out of this is is very clear I mean journalists can continue publishing evidence of corruption but unless unless our authorities are reformed or start acting in the way they should then we're going to continue being in danger so yes our institutions need to be reformed we need Malta to implement the recommendations of the Council of Europe but we need our authorities to begin acting immediately we need to we need to show that corruption is a punishable offense that there are repercussions for it not against journalists but against the people who are guilty of the crimes and in that way begin changing the culture too because I have to say that that it's also a cultural problem. Thank you and we've seen some of that exemplified by Isabel Dos Santos being charged today. Yes I mean that's a really good example because of course she's an extremely corrupt figure took advantage of weak systems of governance within her country took advantage of nepotism but she was enabled by accountants and lawyers in Malta and elsewhere. Malta's government turned a blind eye to the money laundering that was that was allowing money laundering occurring in Malta that was allowing her to siphon all of this money that belonged to the public of Angola and in that way things just got worse and worse for the people of Angola but things also get worse in Malta because what does what do vested interests have to do in order to allow this money laundering to happen the transnational money laundering they have to weaken the institutions in my own country in Malta they have to weaken institutions in Europe. So as you said we really need to work together to make sure that we're fighting what is actually transnational organized crime and corruption together otherwise if there are weak countries like Malta that can continue to enable the corruption of Isabel dos Santos or the corruption of multiple officials then I mean things are just going to continue to get worse. So I want to add to what have just been said about Malta in this dos Santos scandal the role of gatekeepers has been of key importance gatekeepers should do their work gatekeepers and bankers accountants lawyers so assurance companies investment companies so we need this fight against corruption to be done as a stakeholder task including governments including citizens of course investigative journalists are key in the fight against corruption and we need the business sector we were talking yesterday at the patchy meeting we need the business sector to participate actively in the fight against corruption not only because of values integrity or ethics but because of clear effective influence of corruption in competitiveness in in the capacity to do business and to obtain profits so if they don't want to participate out of values they can participate out of very concrete things and we need the engagement of civil society and citizens if societies tolerate corruption they will keep sending the wrong message to the corrupt guys you can go on because we keep on voting you for instance or we keep on buying your products because it doesn't matter well yes corruption matters in terms of sdgs in terms of human rights in terms of democracy so we have to work together is the only way in fact the the position of my family is that while justice for my mother after her murder is important it's the number one priority for us we're never going to be able to bring her back so the best that we can do to make sure that she didn't die in vain is to make sure that a country like multa doesn't end up in the situation ever again because we weren't so corrupt to begin with things were allowed to get worse over time and how can we do this civil society needs to be engaged but really the only solid way to do it is to have effective supranational mechanisms that fight money laundering and cross-border crime and corruption because once i'm multi joined european union in 2004 once that happened we were flooded with new money without the ability to fight the the crime that comes with it so within zones of free trade where money flows freely like the european union or other regional free trade groups that are forming you need to have some level of compromise where states agree to give up some of their sovereignty and with with respect to the rule of law the fight against money laundering and corruption it's really the only way so i'm gonna open up the floor to see if there are any questions in the room the gentleman in back please state your name and your media outlet uh my name is mokit i come from bozana uh my question goes straight to uh transparency international uh i would like to know uh what a your organization review is doing to ensure that good efforts by countries such as bozana uh are sustained in terms of building capacities uh because it's important to have such good support systems or we will be fighting a losing battle thank you we're going to take a couple of questions are there any other questions the gentleman in the front um i am a alan gimel from from daily newspaper lacroix french daily paper and i have a question to mr carona galicia i'm sorry to be so bad in form about malta but um don't you consider that there was some effort done in malta since the murder of your mother so there was not so any reaction from the the government or any reform to to fight against corruption and also i have a question to miss uh ferrara rubio about uh france uh i saw that in your uh index friends um uh withdraw from from four points since the last index and it's difficult for me to understand why there was this um uh this uh downside of the of france so uh if you can give me an explanation please thank you very much and we're going to take one more question if there's any other questions on the floor yes hi i'm my name is tim koh and i work for a um publication called daily maverick in south africa um i just wanted to ask miss rubio to what extent extradition is um to what extent you think extradition changing extradition laws would be helpful here um we um um in south africa we're very frustrated with you know people see that the things are changing and then you know they um move to a country they move their money and they move to a country where there's no extradition agreement and uh then you're really stuck you know the um uh it's important for civil society to see that uh people who are corrupt do get eventually prosecuted and if they're not living in your country anymore it's uh it's difficult to achieve that and i know a couple people joined us late is there any other questions oh yeah lots of questions hi i'm kamaro from melicia nice to meet you again met you congratulation president marisi and uh delia but i'm coming from a country that's famously known as for the one mdb episode my question is there's a worry about the pervasiveness of corruption at the lower level from a traffic police take you know motorist giving but when it happens at the very top tier of nation it has to do with supranational linkages and network how would the ti report work against big companies big brand names like goldman sacks who has not really own up to what has happened to one mdb and in fact is in negotiation for reparation damages is this is the kind of reaction that we're gonna get from such a big big uh incident of corruption then what's the point of the ti uh cpi because it will keep on happening and it will have the adverse effect of the younger population of in my country for example seeing things like that and see the big fish will always get away because this is about big money so if there's a movement here we don't know what's going on behind the scene maybe you're talking to professor claus Schwab if there's so much emphasis on esg where is the emphasis of the stakeholder capitalism movement of metrics to also include the cpi into any big financial investment or development project around the world thank you so who would like to tackle this very good bundle of questions do you want to go Matthew okay i'll start with the question from from la croix so while the the new government has started off on a on a very bad footing um just for people in the room who who aren't aware our prime minister molters prime minister resigned um not so long ago and we have a new government from his same political party party um but which has started off on a on a very bad footing already because many of the people that um that backed up our former prime minister um over the past four years of uh of very aggressive corruption are still within the new government um and it seems that while he is willing to make some concessions i don't think that his government feels the kind of anger at corruption that it should really be feeling it doesn't seem to be honest uh it seems to be more of um of a compromise rather than anything else it doesn't seem to be um it doesn't seem to be rooted in any sense of indignation at the corruption of the former government it seems to be more of a of a case of uh of offering some sort of or some sort of compromise in exchange for um in exchange for things calming down in the long term but uh that's not really what we need now what we need is someone or a group of people in government who are willing to go after corruption in a in a more aggressive way and who feel an honest drive to fight it rather than people who think oh let's just um make this compromise now and in the long term everything will just go away because it isn't going to go away unless something really radical is done then things will be left to fester and of course society will never move forward either because the wound will just be left open Delia? Well I have lots of questions here starting with the journalist from Rotsuana we work through our chapters in more than 100 countries helping governments or proposing laws or proposing mechanisms to take how to account those in power and the business sector in the country according to the situation of the respective countries so we have created lots of tools and we keep on investigating and producing um tools that uh allows the chapter in each country to tackle the problem or to investigate more seriously for instance this year we have been working on money and politics and campaign finance and we have developed tools that allows citizens to see who is giving money to whom in what amounts and what is this money being used to and this kind of information access to information facilitates then the detection of potential conflicts of interest or the evaluation of public policies because if you can see who finance whom you can explain sometimes what decisions has been taken in terms of public policies so there are many tools in terms of France I would have to check all the sources included this is an index of indexes so we have to check what the sources corresponding to France which are on our platform so you can access yourself but I compromise to check with the research team what are the descend figures in the sources that explain this statistical change in some in some cases the mathematical or arithmetical thing of four points up or down are not statistically relevant according to the margin of error but we have to take care of that I come from I commit to to do that and send you the information you can do that and in terms of extradition law of course discussed to do with mutual legal assistance because this is a global problem as you mentioned so we cannot afford to have islands of protection or islands of impunity where people can go and bring the money and have a luxurious life without taking care of what they have done and without being sanctioned so but stopping this mechanism of extradition requires to be effective global action in terms of convention or rules that standards that can be applied worldwide globally in terms of petty petty corruption is the one to one the police the the people that has to pay for a place in the school or a bed in the hospital it's terrible it affects directly individual persons and affects human rights and you have to consider the two-thirds of the 180 countries two-thirds are under 50 so that means that billions of people are facing or are living in everyday corrupt environments affecting their quality of life and their possibilities of future the other type of corruption is grand corruption which needs a special responses because it is global because it involves the highest levels both at the government and and the companies and in in terms of doing something or reflecting the problem the problem of grand corruption Transparency International has many other indexes and reports for instance exporting corruption is a report that analyze what's the behavior of companies vis-a-vis bribing abroad although they are they have their presidential resident and tax resident in countries that are scoring well so we have the exporting corruption report we have done other reports taking into account how countries in the european union for instance are fulfilling the anti-money laundering directives of the european union in order to detect whether they are really fulfilling their commitments and the rules approved or not and we reflect that that's these are informations that are available for everyone investors companies doing business and you mentioned investors and of course they can use this information to in a certain way that determine where to go with the investment and multilaterals for instance can use the anti-corruption information to establish conditionalities when they give loans to countries in order to incentivize the right behavior so there are many things that we are doing and there are different tools that reflects or picture different aspects of corruption and the other one which is very important and and gives the information of how people perceive corruption and suffer corruption in their countries is the global barometer of corruption you can find it in our website and it is not reflecting the opinion of experts or business people it reflects the opinion of people in each of the countries where we are working thank you let me just add to the answer given earlier prone to the question by the Botswana journalist on what transparency national could do or is doing to reward the good efforts that we make in Botswana we had an informal discussion early on with Madam Rubio about the possibility of the brand transparency international the institution transparency international in partnership with the Botswana government hosting a Pan-African conference on anti-corruption to really deal with the scores across Africa including those of Botswana now it's in our national interest to help other countries come up to standard particularly in our region because we trade immensely with countries nearby us but we're also we've also subscribed to the Africa continental free trade agreement and it's it's going to be extremely hard for business people to trade with some countries I'm not mentioning any names because of the indexes that we the indices that we see so we would be advancing this ahead of public services here you'll advance it and we'll find a mutually convenient time so that we do this because our objective is to advance the annihilation of corruption and opportunities for corruption and you talked of extradition or somebody I think talked about changes in extradition law yes we we also experience it as a state we need to have extradition facilitated in manners similar to exporting coffee or beef or whatever there's got to be a demand for it and enablement of it across states particularly for corruption related issues and I'd like to state that Botswana is yellow it does not mean that there is no corruption in Botswana it does not mean that we are necessarily better than last year because these are relative measures so we'd like to hope that one day we'll have an opportunity to actually start getting criteria reference measures so that we measure our performance against our own standards and ourselves so we generally improve and look at the rate of improvement so but we are sure that we're really committed at least politically we're committed to doing all we can to make it extremely hard if not impossible for corruption take place in Botswana and the era of digitization a new challenge is emerge every day thanks I wanted to mention before we close out the forum's work on partnering against corruption initiative which is called patchy which is information that you can find also on our website I encourage you to go to transparency.org to look at the report and look deeper on the findings it sounds like there's we know there's an urgent call for action and collaboration corruption is definitely in one country impacts all countries everywhere and I thank my panelists for sharing their experience and their knowledge and expertise and I thank you all for joining us today thank you