Transparency International

• 1. Introduction

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  Transparency International was founded on the 9th of February 1993, in The Hague, Netherlands, by a group of former World Bank employees who believed corruption was not inevitable but could be named, measured, and fought. The organization asked a question that sounds almost naive: what if the world could rank countries by how corrupt they are? And what if publishing that ranking was itself a weapon against corruption? Within two years, the founders had an answer. They built an index. They put nations on a list. And governments paid attention. The questions worth sitting with are these: how does an organization dedicated to transparency handle accusations of opacity in its own halls? How do you accept millions of dollars from a corporation convicted of bribery without becoming the thing you fight? And can a single number really capture something as slippery as corruption? The answers are complicated, and the story of TI illustrates the difficulty of holding power to account when you are yourself a powerful institution.

• 2. The Founding Circle

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  Political scientist Ellen Gutterman singled out three German individuals whose personal connections and activities shaped TI's early growth: Peter Eigen, Hansjoerg Elshorst, and Michael Wiehen. But the founding membership was notably international from the start. Fritz Heimann came from General Electric, Michael J. Hershman arrived from US military intelligence, and Kamal Hossain was a former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bangladesh. Laurence Cockcroft, Oby Ezekwesili, Frank Vogl, Jeremy Pope, Roy Stacy, Peter Conze, and Gerald Parfitt also joined that founding group, bringing experience from development institutions, accounting firms, and civil society. The organization was formally registered in Berlin on the 15th of June 1993, and Berlin has remained its administrative home ever since. The Secretariat there is deliberately not called a headquarters, a linguistic choice that signals the organization's belief in the autonomy of its local chapters rather than control from the center. By 1995, TI had produced the tool that would define its public identity for decades to come.

• 3. The Index and Its Critics

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  The Corruption Perceptions Index, launched in 1995, does exactly what its name says: it measures perception, not reality. TI drew on surveys of business people to rank nations by how corrupt their public sectors appear to observers. Critics pointed out that this approach penalized developing nations whose reputations may not reflect actual levels of wrongdoing. Others noted a more structural gap, highlighted by the French newspaper Le Monde: the CPI ignores corruption in the business world. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and the manipulation of the Libor rate by major British banks, revealed in 2011, did not lower the scores of the United States or the United Kingdom. TI does not dispute the index's limitations but argues that perceptions matter because firms and individuals make real decisions based on them, and that the CPI is the best high-level tool currently available. A common counterargument holds that no single number can plausibly capture the true scale of a phenomenon as complex as corruption, let alone rank countries by it. Despite those debates, the index became an annual publication, and TI issued it every year after 1995, giving governments and investors a reference point they used whether they trusted the methodology or not. The Bribe Payers Index, first published in 1999 and tracking how likely a country's multinational firms are to offer bribes abroad, extended the measurement project into corporate behavior, though that publication was eventually discontinued for funding reasons after its 2011 edition.

• 4. A Portfolio of Tools

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  Beyond the CPI, TI built a suite of publications designed to cover different dimensions of corruption. The Global Corruption Barometer asks ordinary citizens about their direct personal experience, which grounds the data in lived encounters rather than business surveys. The Global Corruption Report takes a single thematic focus each year, such as corruption in climate change, and goes deep. The Government Defence Integrity Index, first published in 2013, examines corruption specifically in the military and defence sectors across 82 countries, a measurement exercise some governments have pushed back against on methodological grounds. The Exporting Corruption report, launched in 2005, rates leading global exporters on their bribery-related performance, focusing on countries that have signed the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention. National integrity system assessments provide country-level analysis of a government's full range of mechanisms for fighting corruption, from courts and parliaments to civil society. In 2016, TI added an investigative dimension by partnering with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a partnership co-funded by three governments including the United States, designed to feed OCCRP's field investigations into TI's policy and legal work. The organization's strategy running through 2030, titled "Holding Power to Account - A Global Strategy Against Corruption 2021-2030", frames all of these tools within a single goal: a world in which power is held to account for the common good.

• 5. The Movement and Its Chapters

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  TI's more than 100 national chapters, collectively called The Movement, carry the organization's work into specific national contexts. Transparency International Bangladesh holds the distinction of being the chapter with the largest number of members. Not every chapter takes the TI name: the Association for a More Just Society is the TI chapter for Honduras, and Corruption Watch serves that function for South Africa. Chapters must pass an accreditation process and face re-accreditation every three years, with failure risking removal from The Movement. That enforcement mechanism was applied to TI Croatia in November 2015, following a confidence collapse linked to accusations against the chapter president, including falsifying records, conflicts of interest, and the arbitrary expulsion of ten members. The Croatian government eventually revoked the president's appointment. In Russia, the chapter's fate was determined by external political pressure rather than internal governance: Russia's Ministry of Justice added TI Russia to its list of foreign agents in April 2015, and on the 6th of March 2023, Russia declared TI an undesirable organization outright. The US chapter followed a different path, stripped of accreditation by the International Board of Directors on the 10th of January 2017, with the stated reason being a divergence in philosophies and priorities. Reports elsewhere described TI-USA as having come to be seen as a corporate front group, funded by multinational corporations including Pfizer, Google, ExxonMobil, and Bechtel, among others. A new US chapter was established on the 1st of January 2020.

• 6. The Siemens Question

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  In January 2015, reporting surfaced that TI had accepted $3 million from a foundation established by Siemens, the German engineering multinational. Siemens had paid one of the largest corporate corruption fines in history in 2008: $1.6 billion for bribing government officials across numerous countries, including Greece, Norway, Iraq, Vietnam, Italy, Israel, Argentina, Venezuela, China, and Russia. TI's own due diligence procedures explicitly forbid accepting money from corporations seeking to clean their reputations through donations. TI's then managing director Cobus de Swardt drew a distinction in response, saying the organization had applied not to Siemens but to the Siemens Integrity Initiative, a foundation set up separately following the guilty plea. The funding was further complicated by the fact that a TI staff member from the EU office had gone to work for the Siemens foundation roughly a year before the grant was awarded, prompting questions about a revolving door. Several TI national chapters also received funds from the Siemens Integrity Initiative, including $660,000 for TI USA, $600,000 for TI Italy, $450,000 for TI Bulgaria, and $230,000 for TI Mexico, each over three years. The project funded was called the Integrity Pact and focused on strengthening government procurement practices; TI credited it with producing a procurement model now used worldwide. What the episode exposed was the tension at the heart of TI's funding model: an organization that exists to fight corruption must raise money from the world in which corruption operates.

• 7. Internal Fractures

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  In August 2015, former TI staffer Anna Buzzoni went public with her account of retaliation she and colleagues faced after reporting questionable financial dealings at TI's Water Integrity Network to managers. Two of her project responsibilities were suspended, and she was transferred against her will. She had left TI shortly before internal whistleblower guidelines were adopted in June 2014. That case was followed by a longer period of internal turbulence at the Berlin Secretariat. In 2017, managing director Cobus de Swardt left following a dispute with the board, reaching a settlement in a Labour Court in Berlin. In August 2019, The Guardian published accounts from seven current and former Secretariat staff describing a toxic workplace culture. In 2021, de Swardt published a book through Springer accusing TI of abuse of power, and released a companion video on YouTube. His successor, Patricia Moreira, departed in 2020 after making similar accusations, including that the board had failed to protect her as a whistleblower. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that TI dismissed Moreira without giving any reasons, and quoted employees describing an organization riven by political infighting. An investigator contracted by Moreira found that the board's handling of the complaints process was compromised by conflicts of interest. Daniel P. Eriksson was appointed interim managing director in March 2020 and became CEO the following year; during his tenure leading up to January 2025, the organization's internal culture was reported to have improved significantly. Maira Martini, who had served as Head of Policy and Advocacy at the Secretariat, took office as CEO on the 1st of February 2025.

• 8. Brazil and Political Impartiality

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  Questions about TI's political neutrality surfaced in the Brazilian context following leaked conversations from prosecutors involved in Operation Car Wash, published by The Intercept after a hack. Those conversations, from a chat group that included chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol and the head of TI Brazil, contained references to a backstage campaign to "disarm resistance on the left", plans to fund selected candidates and target others using social media, and preparations for false accusations intended to damage the reputation of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Participants in the chat were reported to have celebrated the election of Jair Bolsonaro. In April 2022, Brazil's Tribunal de Contas da União announced it had opened an investigation into TI related to the imprisonment of Lula da Silva. That investigation was unanimously closed in July 2025. A separate inquiry was opened on the 5th of February 2024 by Supreme Court minister Dias Toffoli, examining whether TI Brazil had received funds from a leniency agreement with the J&F group. The Prosecutor General of the Republic, Paulo Gonet, requested closure of that case on the 16th of October 2024, citing a lack of proper evidence, and Toffoli closed the investigation on the 12th of March 2026. The Brazilian episode sits alongside the organization's 2013 handling of the Edward Snowden question, when TI members from Germany and Ireland proposed a resolution recognizing Snowden as a whistleblower, only to see any reference to Snowden removed from the final text after TI USA intervened.