Seychelles has maintained its top ranking for the sub-Saharan African region in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) released on Tuesday.
The island nation retained the position for the 5th consecutive year and 23rd ranking globally attained in 2022 with 70 points once again.
Denmark outperformed Finland and took first place with 90 points. Finland and New Zealand are second and third with 87 points each.
The CPI report rates the perception of corruption in the public sector using a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is clean. Seychelles stayed in 23rd place globally like in 2021 with a score of 70 points. The island state again outperformed major Western democracies like the United States, which did better than last year and climbed to 24th position with a score of 69 points.
The commissioner of the Anti-Corruption Commission of Seychelles, (ACCS), May De Silva, said in a press statement that this is good news for the islands.
"We are therefore delighted that this positive action and our tireless efforts to root out corruption by our committed staff and the supportive public has been recognised and that we are able to maintain our global position as the 23rd least corrupt country in the world and remain the least corrupt country in Africa," said de Silva.
She said that "in this reporting period we have made more arrests for corruption related offences, charged more suspects, and submitted more cases to the AG's office for consideration of charges than ever before. With this increase in reporting and anti-corruption activity, we expected to be perceived as a more corrupt country than this time last year because we have lifted the stone."
The ACCS commissioner added that "we look forward to hosting the Commonwealth Africa Anti-Corruption Heads annual meeting in May this year. We in the ACCS are not, and will never be, complacent in the fight against corruption in Seychelles and we are focused on continuing to work to eradicate this crime to make our society fairer for all our citizens."
Meanwhile, the ACCS currently has two cases before the Supreme Court of Seychelles, namely the 'missing $50 million' case, where foreign aid was removed from a government account in 2002, and the mismanagement of loans at the Seychelles Business Finance Agency (SBFA).
