As some people will know President Dilma Rousseff has, since she took over from President Lula in November 2010, suffered the resignation of three ministers over the past seven months - Antonio Palocci (Home Affairs), Alfredo Nascimento (Transport) and Wagner Rossi (Agriculture) - due to alleged corruption. There have also been a number of other high officials who have also resigned.
At the this week’s swearing in of the new Minister for Agriculture Mendes Ribeiro, Presidente Rousseff said “that it was her duty to see an end to the impunity which shelters many of those accused of involvement in corruption practices and we will punish all abuses and excesses.” It appears that the President is taking a much harder line on corruption than her predecessors, but runs the political risk of alienating some of her political support in Congress.
The challenge though with this sort of social change is the relationship between corruption, transparency, the handling of political power and the distribution of wealth. These items have been the bogey men through history for all countries and as you might imagine some countries are worse than others. What some people may not know is that all signatories to the OCED have since 2002 been party to the International Transparency ratings list and if you go on http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2010/results you will see some interesting statistics, which will surprise and shock you, well it did me. I thought that the UK would be at the top but we aren’t .. we are in 20th place with a relatively lowly 7.6 points and Brazil is in 69th place with a score of 3.7. The idea has been to make countries clean up their act and certainly the behaviour of our MP’s and bankers demonstrates that the UK is probably in the right place. The table below shows some of the other countries:| Position | Country | Score |
| 1 | Denmark, New Zealand, Singapore | 9.3 |
| 8 | Australia, Switzerland | 8.7 |
| 15 | Germany and Austria | 7.9 |
| 17 | Japan | 7.8 |
| 20 | United Kingdom | 7.6 |
| 22 | United States | 7.1 |
| 25 | France | 6.8 |
| 30 | Israel | 6.1 |
| 67 | Italy | 3.9 |
| 69 | Brazil | 3.7 |
| 76 | China | 3.5 |
| 78 | Greece | 3.5 |
| 87 | India | 3.3 |
| 154 | Russia | 2.1 |
The interesting thing is that the Scandinavian countries are way out ahead, the Antipodes are at the top with some of Europe, the UK is above the US and France but the BRICS are quite a way down and President Roussseff wants to improve their position as the Brazil begins to take a more important place on the world stage. Certainly for the UK this is a bit of a wake-up call and certainly it is great that Brazil is doing something about it.
