It ranks, together with Greece, Jordan and Namibia, 58th out of 180 countries and territories evaluated in the Berlin-based watchdog’s 2021 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) presented on Tuesday.
Armenia and two other countries shared 60th place in the previous CPI released a year ago. Transparency International assigned the South Caucasus state a CPI “score” of 49 out of 100 at the time.
The watchdog kept the score, which is above the global average of 43, unchanged in the latest survey.
“Following the 2018 Velvet Revolution, Armenia initially made both significant democratic improvements and positive strides against corruption, climbing 15 points on the CPI over the last decade,” it said in a report. “But despite progress, in 2021 promised anti-corruption and judicial reforms stalled in the wake of the political and economic crisis triggered by the pandemic and renewed conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.”
“No progress was registered in 2021,” agreed Varuzhan Hoktanian, the programs director at Transparency International’s Armenian affiliate.
“I don’t yet see serious economic, political or social reforms,” he said. “That is why we have this situation.”
Armenia was 105th in the rankings three years ago. A Transparency International report released in January 2021 hailed “steady and positive improvements in anti-corruption” achieved there since the 2018 regime change.
Hoktanian suggested that the major change in corruption perceptions reflected post-revolution optimism that reigned in the country in 2018-2019.
“People expected things to get better,” Hoktanian told a news conference. “That is why the CPI went up. Now that period [of euphoria] is over, and both businesspeople and local and international experts are starting to perceive the situation with corruption through more concrete facts.”
“Secondly, you may recall that some serious steps were taken [by the authorities] in 2018 and 2019,” he said. “Whether that was good or bad is a different question.”
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has repeatedly claimed to have eliminated “systemic corruption” since coming to power in May 2018. Armenian law-enforcement authorities have launched dozens of high-profile corruption investigations during his rule. They have mostly targeted former top government officials and individuals linked to them.
The authorities set up last year a special law-enforcement agency tasked with investigating corruption cases. They are also forming new courts that will deal only with such cases.
Critics say that Pashinian uses corruption inquiries to crack down on his political opponents. They also claim that some members of his entourage are busy enriching themselves or their cronies.
Companies owned by or linked otherwise to at least three senior Armenian officials, including Pashinian’s deputy chief of staff, won dozens of government contracts in 2021, raising suspicions of a conflict of interest and even corruption. Pashinian insisted last month that they did not exploit their government connections to win tenders for road construction and procurements.