MACC) chief commissioner Datuk Dzulkifli Ahmad described as ‘not significant’ Malaysia’s global ranking drop in Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). — Bernama pic

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 26 — The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) chief commissioner Datuk Dzulkifli Ahmad has downplayed Malaysia’s global ranking decline in Transparency International’s (TI) annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), saying that the drop was not significant.

In a live broadcast interview with news channel Astro Awani, he pointed out that Malaysia’s 55th place out of 176 countries last year was just one spot lower than its rankings from 2015 where it was in the 54th place out of 168 countries back then.

“It is only a drop of one spot. The decline is not significant, the TI president also said so himself,” Dzulkifli said, referring to Transparency International-Malaysia president Datuk Akhbar Satar.

“The MACC has formed a task force to look into this matter of CPI rankings, and we will take action to make sure the index gets better next year and the year after that,” he added.

Malaysia had been improving in the annual rankings, moving from the 54th spot out of 176 countries in 2012 to the 53rd spot out of 177 countries in 2013, and the 50th spot out of 175 countries in 2014.

Putrajaya aims to have Malaysia achieve a ranking of 30th place by 2020.

With the scale of 0 to 100 showing a country as falling on the range of “perceived to be highly corrupted” to “perceived to be very clean”, Malaysia had in 2013 and 2014 gradually improved its CPI score to 50 and 52, before dropping to 50 again in the 2015 survey.

Among its Southeast Asian peers, Malaysia last year was ranked third, just below Singapore and Brunei who had a global ranking of 7th spot and 41th spot with their respective scores of 84 and 58. This marks a decline from Singapore’s 2015 score of 85 and Brunei’s score of 60 when it was last surveyed.

Prior to Brunei’s rejoining of the survey in 2016, Malaysia had ranked second in the previous two years’ editions.

Indonesia took the fourth spot within the region with its global ranking of 90 and CPI score of 37, followed by the Philippines (101th, 35), Thailand (101th, 35), Vietnam (113rd, 33), Laos (123rd, 30), Myanmar (136th, 28) and Cambodia (156th, 21).

Within the region where most suffered a decline or maintained scores, the only countries that improved their scores were Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar, while the latter two and Singapore went up in their rankings.