DHAKA, Oct 20: The Transparency International, a Berlin-based international body fighting corruption worldwide, found Bangladesh the most corrupt country in the world as per its Corruption Perceptions Index.

This is for the fourth consecutive time Bangladesh has been considered 'champion in corruption'. The government of Bangladesh, however, is yet to comment on the TI observation.

"We have not yet seen the TI report. So we are neither accepting it, nor are we rejecting the findings at the moment, Harris Chowdhury, political secretary to Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, told the press this evening. "Once we have seen it we will decide whether to make a comment."

This year, Bangladesh ranked 145th position jointly with Haiti with lowest scores of 1.5 in the index, published worldwide on Wednesday. In 2003, Bangladesh scored the lowest 1.3 among 133 countries.

The Corruption Perceptions Index reflects the perceptions of business people and country analysts, both resident and non-resident.

This year's index draws on 18 surveys provided to the TI between 2002 and 2004, conducted by 12 independent institutions.

At a press briefing on Wednesday in the city, Prof Mozaffar Ahmed, a member of the trustee board of the local chapter of the organization, said that it was unfortunate that the position of that country had remained the same despite the fact that a number of other countries had been added to this year's list. "Although there are a lot of controversies about the mathematics of scoring, we can conclude in line with the World Economic Forum report that Bangladesh is one of the 17 most corrupt countries, which have scores below 3."

The professor, however, told the press that the CPI 2004 was published from London and the Bangladesh chapter had no involvement in preparing the index. "Corruption cannot be uprooted unless the government is serious about it. For the last few years we have been pursuing both the government and the opposition parties for scraping the Official Secrecy Act to establish right to information and separation of judiciary in order to improve the situation. These are yet to be implemented," he said responding to a question.

A total of 106 out of 146 countries score less than 5 against a clean score of 10, according to the latest index.

Sixty countries score less than 3 out of 10, indicating rampant corruption. Corruption is perceived to be most acute in Bangladesh, Haiti, Nigeria, Chad, Myanmar, Azerbaijan and Paraguay, all of which have a score of less than 2.

Prof Mozaffar said that this year TI had collected data about Bangladesh from different surveys and reports of Columbia University, the Economist Intelligence Unit, the World Bank, the Merchant International Group, the World Markets Research Centre and the World Economic Forum.

DHAKA QUESTIONS METHOD: The Dhaka government has questioned the methodology of Transparency International after the naming of Bangladesh as the most corrupt nation (agencies add).