Trouble at the top: why high-scoring countries aren’t corruption-free

Denmark, which tops the list this year, has recently been rocked by the money-laundering scandal surrounding Danske Bank, its biggest lender, among other corruption cases. About US$230 billion of suspicious transactions are thought to have passed through Danske Bank’s Estonian branch, which has been linked to the Russian Laundromat and Azerbaijani Laundromat schemes uncovered by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

In November, Danske Bank was preliminarily charged for breaking Denmark’s anti-money laundering laws.

Swiss banks, and other financial intermediaries and enablers, regularly play a significant role in large-scale money-laundering and corruption schemes around the world, such as those related to 1MBD in Malaysia, Odebrecht and Petrobas in Brazil, or Mozambique’s “tuna bond” scandal.

The Financial Action Task Force, which scores countries across 11 categories on their anti-money laundering effectiveness, gave only one top-seven country, Sweden, a high effectiveness score, and that in only one of the 11 categories.