Greece was the European Union member state that saw the biggest decrease in annual rankings measuring perceptions of corruption across the world.

It dropped three points in a year and is one of five countries in the bloc considered to be more corrupt than it is clean.

Transparency International’s (TI) rankings listed Bulgaria as the EU country where corruption is felt the most.

Greece is the second worst in the bloc followed by Hungary, Romania and Croatia.

While the perception of corruption among EU countries is highest in Bulgaria, it is the lowest in Denmark. The document will be presented today in Brussels.



Out of 180 countries surveyed, our country ranks 77th with a score of 42 points. Denmark, which has the best performances in the EU and the world, receives 88 points and Somalia is at the bottom of the ranking with 10 points and takes 180th place. The EU average score is 66 points.



For Bulgaria, it is reported that for the last year it has yielded a single point, with a similar result Greece with 45 points (annual decline by 3 points) and Hungary with 46 points (a decrease of 8 points for the last five years). Hungary and Malta have marked the largest retreat in recent years, the report added.

Bulgaria and Romania (61st and 47th points) reported some progress in recent years, the document says, but it is noted that there was a "serious corruption scandal" in our country last year.



It is added that despite the EC's monitoring of the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism, Bulgaria and Romania show "little progress" in the reform of the judiciary and the fight against corruption.



In Bulgaria, many citizens do not trust the political institutions and do not feel well represented. Supervision of party funding is limited and there are no independent and transparent media in the country, is added in the text. It is often unclear who owns a media, many media are financially dependent on publicity, and this may affect their work and reflect the criticism they would otherwise apply to government authorities, the analysis said.

Most countries in the world fail to fight corruption and this contributes to the crisis of democracy. Over 2/3 of the countries this year show a score below 50 points and the average score is 43 points. For the last five years, only 20 countries have significantly improved their performance, including Argentina and Côte d'Ivoire, while there was a significant fallout at 16, including Australia, Chile and Malta.



There is a link between corruption and the state of democracy. True democracies have an average of about 75 points; imperfect democracies have an average of 49 points; mixed regimes with autocratic bias - 35; authoritarian modes - 30 points, according to the applied indicator, summarizes the organization. It is clarified that the "perception of corruption" has been measured since 1995 and evaluates the work of the state officials and clerks.