Transparency: Corruption Slowly Rising in Lebanon

Lebanon was ranked in 136th place in a survey carried out by graft watchdog Transparency International, dropping one point to a score of 27, a sign of a small rise in corruption compared to the past years.

Transparency International ranks 175 countries on a scale of 0-100, where zero means very corrupt and 100 signifies very clean. This year the average score was 43, and 84 percent of countries, including Lebanon, were below 50.

Lebanon scored 28 last year and 30 in 2012 in the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI).

This year's index ranked Sudan, North Korea and Somalia as the worst offenders and Denmark, New Zealand and Finland as the most squeaky clean.

It pointed to a rise in reports of corruption in Turkey, which suffered the year's biggest fall in rank, and low rankings for the major emerging economies known collectively as the BRICs -- Brazil, Russia, India and China.

The Berlin-based group says that because corruption is illegal and secretive, it cannot be empirically measured. So instead it collates surveys from the World Bank, African Development Bank, Economist Intelligence Unit and other bodies.

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