LONDON, March 25: Western companies fuel corruption in the developing world and flaunt their governments' anti-bribery laws, an international corruption watchdog said on Thursday.

Companies from Australia, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria and Canada top the 2003 bribe-payers index compiled by advocacy group Transparency International, based on a survey of some 800 business experts in 15 developing countries.

All these countries have introduced anti-corruption laws to comply with an OECD convention banning bribery of foreign officials. "We are very much aware that a lot of the responsibility for corruption in the developing world has been with northern companies and northern institutions," Peter Eigen, chairman of Transparency International, told a news conference.

His organization also criticized the United Kingdom, eighth in the bribers' league, for only belatedly creating laws to comply with the convention. A Home Office spokesman said the UK government had shown its commitment to the fight against corruption by outlawing bribery abroad in its 2002 anti-terrorism act, but that there had so far been no prosecutions.

MAGIC WAND: On the receiving side, Bangladesh ranked as the most corrupt in a separate survey of 133 countries, narrowly beating Nigeria and Haiti.

The survey charts levels of corruption in the public sector as perceived by business people, academics and risk analysts. When asked in another survey which institution they would pick to eliminate corruption in if they had a magic wand, people in two-thirds of 44 countries polled chose political parties.

Transparency International committee member Jeremy Carver expressed concern over the political influence corporations could gain through campaign donations in the United States.

He also pointed to what he called a lack of transparency in the awarding of contracts in Iraq, highlighting the role of oil company Halliburton, run by US Vice President Dick Cheney until 2000.

"(Halliburton 's case) puts into perspective some of the numbers in our list," Carver said. "In our list we have leaders getting away with one or two billion dollars over a space of several years, and then there's Halliburton being awarded contracts of eight billion dollars without tender - it surely raises a lot of questions," he added.