Transparency International published its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2025 on 10 February this year. Denmark scored 89 out of 100. Malta scored 49, three points better than the year before, eight points worse than in 2012, and sixth from the bottom in the European Union.
I have heard the same answer to that number for most of my adult life: wait for the next election. Put the other lot in and the problem goes away. We have tried that. Government in Malta changed hands in 1987, in 1996, in 1998 and in 2013. The numbers did not improve because the flag on Castille changed.
Look at the record without the party colours. The Enemalta oil procurement affair, where a pardoned trader told the courts he had paid commissions to people connected to the corporation between 1999 and 2006, happened under Nationalist administrations and came to light in January 2013. Ten years later, as MaltaToday reported in 2023, the main cases had still not been decided. Then, under a Labour administration, the public inquiry into the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia reported in July 2021. Three judges wrote of “incestuous relations” between the public administration at the highest levels of power, big business and organised crime.
Two different governments. The same weakness in both: the space where political decisions and business interests meet is badly lit, and the people who work inside it know it.
So I went looking at the countries that sit at the top of the index, to see what they do about that space. The short answer is that they do not rely on good people winning elections. They rely on rules that apply to whoever wins.
What the best-governed countries have in common
The countries at the top of the index (the full list is in the table below) are not a club of like-minded states. Some are monarchies and some are republics. Switzerland is run by a coalition that barely changes, and Singapore has been governed by the same party since 1959. What they share is a handful of habits, and the first is that official information is public unless there is a good reason to keep it private, rather than the other way round.
| Rank | Country | Score | How it is governed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Denmark | 89 | Parliamentary monarchy |
| 2 | Finland | 88 | Parliamentary republic |
| 3 | Singapore | 84 | Parliamentary republic, one party in power since 1959 |
| 4= | New Zealand | 81 | Parliamentary monarchy |
| 4= | Norway | 81 | Parliamentary monarchy |
| 6= | Sweden | 80 | Parliamentary monarchy |
| 6= | Switzerland | 80 | Federal republic, standing multi-party executive |
| 8= | Luxembourg | 78 | Parliamentary monarchy (grand duchy) |
| 8= | Netherlands | 78 | Parliamentary monarchy |
| 10= | Germany | 77 | Federal parliamentary republic |
| 10= | Iceland | 77 | Parliamentary republic |
| Malta | 49 | Parliamentary republic; sixth-lowest score in the EU |
Habit one: official records are open by default
Sweden set this down in its Freedom of the Press Act of 1766, which gave the public a right to see official records, including the minutes of parliament and government. It is usually described as the first law of its kind anywhere. Finland, then part of the Swedish kingdom, grew up with the same principle. Norway has taken it into the digital age. Under its Freedom of Information Act of 2006, central government bodies publish their mail journals on a service called eInnsyn, a running log of the letters and emails they send and receive, which any citizen or journalist can search anonymously and free of charge.
Think about what that does to a meeting between a minister and a developer. In Oslo, a journalist can see that the correspondence exists, when it was logged, and who it was with, and can then ask for the documents themselves. Nobody has to leak anything. The default does the work.
Malta has had a Freedom of Information Act since 2008. Yet the European Commission’s 2025 Rule of Law Report still recommends that Malta improve journalists’ access to official documents, and notes that the electronic system promised to process and track these requests “has not yet been set up”. The law is on the books. The habit of openness is not there yet.
Habit two: party money is disclosed and checked
The second habit is about money, and here the best-governed countries are less tidy than people assume. Switzerland had no national rules on political donations at all until recently. The current ones were first applied at the 2023 federal election. Parties in parliament now have to report any donation above 15,000 francs from a single donor in a year, anyone spending more than 50,000 francs on a campaign has to say where the money came from, and anonymous or foreign donations are generally banned. The Swiss Federal Audit Office checks the returns and passes breaches to prosecutors, and the fine can reach 40,000 francs. Denmark, top of the whole index, was told by the Council of Europe’s anti-corruption body GRECO in 2018 that it was “rather disappointed” by how little had changed in its party financing rules since its 2010 evaluation.
I mention these gaps on purpose. Nobody at the top of this table is perfect. The Swiss lesson is in what they did once people started asking questions. Parliament wrote the rules down, and the job of checking them went to the federal audit office, which sits outside party politics.
Transparency International’s own analysis this year puts a number on why that matters. Countries that enforce full disclosure of campaign donations average 68 on the index. Countries with no disclosure average 31.
Malta’s party financing law took effect in 2016. No single donor may give more than 25,000 euro a year, and anyone giving over 7,000 euro has to be named. I have no quarrel with those numbers. The trouble started in October 2018. The Constitutional Court ruled that the Electoral Commission could not investigate a party and then sit in judgment on it too, and since then there has been no working way to enforce the law. A MEDDMO fact-check published in January 2026 found that the fix had still not been made, and that both main parties report donations bunched just under the 7,000 euro line. So the money still reaches the parties, and nobody is currently able to check it properly.
Habit three: lobbying is written down
The third habit is the one closest to the problem I started with: who gets to talk to government, about what, and whether anyone else can find out.
Finland only got a statutory lobbying register on 1 January 2024. Its National Audit Office runs it. Lobbyists have to say who they tried to influence, which topics they raised, how they made contact, who their clients were, and, once a year, what the lobbying cost them. The entries stay online for ten years.
Germany argued about a register for more than ten years before it passed one. Its Lobby Register Act started on 1 January 2022, and parliament tightened it from 1 March 2024. Registered lobbyists must now name the people doing the lobbying, list any jobs they held in government or parliament over the past five years, name the bills and regulations they are working on, and give their main sources of funding. The written statements they send to the Bundestag go on the record as well. Critics in Germany still say it is too soft, and the Council of Europe has said much the same. Even so, a German voter can look up who is lobbying on a draft law while that law is still being written.
Now try the same exercise here. Malta has no statutory lobbying register. The Standards in Public Life Act of 2017 gave us a Commissioner for Standards, which was a real step, but the European Commission’s 2025 Rule of Law Report still lists “rules on lobbying” among the integrity measures where “action ... remains to be taken”. The same report says ministers filed their asset declarations in March 2025, a few months late, and that those declarations remain unpublished. MPs’ declarations can be seen, but only in person and on request.
So if a developer, a concessionaire or a large importer meets a minister in Valletta about a policy that affects them, there is no public place where that meeting is recorded. There may be nothing wrong with the meeting at all. The problem is that none of us can tell.
Habit four: consequences reach the top
The fourth habit is that the rules reach the top. In October 2024 a Singapore court sent S. Iswaran, a former transport minister, to prison for twelve months. He had pleaded guilty to taking valuable gifts as a public servant, among them flights, hotel stays and tickets, and to obstructing justice. The judge thought the six to seven months the prosecution asked for was too little. Iswaran was the first minister charged and tried in a Singapore court since 1975.
Iceland went through something closer to our own experience. In April 2016 the Panama Papers named an offshore company that the prime minister and his wife had owned, and within days he was out of office. The Dutch case is less dramatic and, to me, more telling. A parliamentary committee found that the tax authority had wrongly hounded thousands of families over childcare benefits, and in January 2021 Mark Rutte’s entire cabinet resigned over it. In each case the consequence landed on the people at the top, not on a junior official.
Singapore is also the case that could be used against my own argument, and I should deal with it. The People’s Action Party has been in power without a break since 1959, and the country is still third on the index. So a change of party is plainly not what keeps Singapore clean. What does keep it clean, as far as I can tell, is the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau, which opened the Iswaran file in July 2023 with the prime minister’s agreement, ministerial salaries set high enough that a gift of tickets is not worth the risk, and courts that treat a minister like anyone else. Singapore also restricts its press and its opposition in ways I would never want to see in Malta, so I would borrow the enforcement and leave the rest where it is.
Luxembourg, also in the top ten, is a useful warning of a different kind. It took to court the PwC employee who leaked the LuxLeaks tax rulings, and in February 2023 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights found that convicting him had breached his right to freedom of expression. The index measures how corrupt the public sector is thought to be. It says a lot less about how close a small state has grown to the companies it attracts, which is a question Malta should recognise.
| Habit | What a top-ten country does | Where Malta stands |
|---|---|---|
| Official records open by default | Norway: ministries publish their mail journals on eInnsyn under the Freedom of Information Act 2006 | Freedom of Information Act since 2008; the promised request-tracking system “has not yet been set up” (European Commission, 2025) |
| Party money disclosed and checked | Switzerland: donations over CHF 15,000 reported, checked by the Federal Audit Office, fines up to CHF 40,000 | €25,000 cap, donors over €7,000 named; no working enforcement since the October 2018 court ruling |
| Lobbying written down | Finland: statutory register since January 2024. Germany: since January 2022, tightened March 2024 | No statutory register; ministers’ 2025 asset declarations filed but unpublished |
| Consequences reach the top | Singapore jailed a former minister in 2024; the Dutch cabinet resigned in 2021 | Main Enemalta oil procurement cases still undecided ten years after they surfaced (MaltaToday, 2023) |
Why a change of government does not fix it
Why, then, does a change of government not fix this on its own? Political scientists have a fairly good answer. In a 2013 paper in the journal Governance, Anna Persson, Bo Rothstein and Jan Teorell argued that anti-corruption reforms often fail because they treat corruption as a problem of a few bad agents who need watching. Where corruption is systemic, they wrote, it behaves more like a collective action problem. Each person’s behaviour depends on what they expect everyone else to do. If you believe the other side took favours when it was in power, you see little reason to refuse them when your turn comes, and the voters who put you there often expect the same. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi makes a related point in her 2015 book The Quest for Good Governance: what keeps corruption down is the balance between the opportunities people have to be corrupt and the constraints that stop them. An election changes who holds those opportunities, and leaves the opportunities where they were.
That matches what I see in Malta. A new government inherits the same small circle of big contractors, the same party-owned television stations, the same appointments to boards and authorities made by the people in power, and the same unenforced donation law. Its own donors, activists and friends then arrive with the same expectations the last lot’s did.
I want to be fair to both parties here, because each has done something. The Standards in Public Life Act was passed under a Labour government in 2017. The party financing law came in under the same administration, and much of the earlier reform, including the Freedom of Information Act of 2008, was passed under the Nationalists. What these laws have in common, as I read them, is that each stops short of the part that would bind the government that passed it.
Five things Malta could copy
If I had to pick what Malta should copy first, I would start with the things that bind whoever wins the next election, because those are the ones no party will volunteer for once it is in Castille.
First, fix party financing enforcement and give it to a body that does not answer to the parties, the way the Swiss gave it to their federal audit office. The 2018 court ruling explained what was wrong. Eight years is long enough to have written the fix. Second, pass a lobbying register modelled on Finland’s or Germany’s, run by the Standards Commissioner or the National Audit Office, covering ministers, their chiefs of staff and the heads of the big authorities, with meetings logged and published. Third, publish ministers’ asset declarations online, on time, every year, and let MPs’ declarations be read without a trip to Parliament. Fourth, build the freedom of information system the government has already promised, and publish ministry correspondence logs in the way Norway does. Fifth, when an inquiry or an audit names a failure, make the consequence reach the office that was responsible, whichever party happens to be in it.
None of this is exotic. Most of it costs very little. The first four are already law somewhere in the top ten, and several are things the European Commission has been asking Malta to do for years.
What I will be watching
There are some things I will be watching over the next twelve months. Does a lobbying bill reach Parliament, and does it cover ministers’ private secretariats? Are the 2025 ministerial declarations published? Is there a draft amendment giving the party financing law a working enforcement route before the next general election? And does Malta’s score on next February’s index move, in either direction?
My honest conclusion is that voting a government out is still worth doing when it deserves it. It just will not change the way politics and business meet in this country unless the rules change with it. The countries at the top of the table worked that out a long time ago.
Common questions
Which countries are the least corrupt in the world?
Denmark, by Transparency International’s count. Its 2025 index gave Denmark 89 out of 100 and Finland 88, with Singapore third on 84. Germany and Iceland share tenth place on 77, which is why my table has eleven names in it. Malta got 49.
Why is changing the party in government not enough to fix corruption?
I think it helps to ask what actually changes on the day after an election. The ministers change. The unenforced donation law, the missing lobbying register and the expectations of the people who helped win the campaign stay exactly where they were. Persson, Rothstein and Teorell call this a collective action problem: people do what they expect everyone else to do.
Does Malta have a lobbying register?
Not yet. We have had a Commissioner for Standards in Public Life since the 2017 Act, which I count as progress, but nobody is required by law to record who lobbied a minister and about what. Brussels flagged this again in its 2025 Rule of Law Report. Finland has had a register since January 2024.
How well is party financing enforced in Malta?
Badly. The numbers in the law are fine: 25,000 euro a year from any one donor, and a name has to be published for anything above 7,000 euro. Then in October 2018 the Constitutional Court said the Electoral Commission could not be investigator and judge at once, and as far as I can find, nobody has repaired that since.
Sources: Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index 2025 and CPI 2025 report, 10 February 2026; The Malta Independent, “Malta receives score of 49 in 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index”, 10 February 2026; MaltaToday, “Ten years on: no justice served on Enemalta oil scandal”, 24 January 2023; Board of Inquiry into the death of Daphne Caruana Galizia, final report, 29 July 2021, as reported by MaltaToday; Swedish Freedom of the Press Act, 1766; Norwegian Government, archives, journalling and eInnsyn; European Commission, 2025 Rule of Law Report, country chapter on Malta; Swiss Confederation, transparency of political funding; Council of Europe, GRECO report on Denmark, 6 June 2018; MEDDMO, “Fact-check Malta: how much are political parties declaring in donations?”, 23 January 2026; Finnish Transparency Register Act, in force 1 January 2024 (avoimuusrekisteri.fi); German Lobby Register Act, in force 1 January 2022, amended 1 March 2024; Public Prosecutor v S. Iswaran, sentenced 3 October 2024; European Court of Human Rights, Halet v Luxembourg (Grand Chamber), 14 February 2023; Anna Persson, Bo Rothstein and Jan Teorell, “Why anticorruption reforms fail: systemic corruption as a collective action problem”, Governance 26(3), 2013, 449 to 471; Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control of Corruption, Cambridge University Press, 2015.