VP rejects TIGI’s corruption report as a “damp squib”

Vice President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo has categorically rejected the findings of Transparency International’s (TI) 2024 Corruption Perception Index (CPI), and has labelled the report a “damp squib.”

Jagdeo’s remarks come amidst rising tensions between the ruling People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPP/C) and local non-governmental organization (NGO) Transparency Institute Guyana Incorporated (TIGI), whom he has accused of downplaying the Government’s progress in combatting corruption.
During his weekly press conference on Thursday, Jagdeo highlighted a concerning regional trend and revealed that several countries — including the United States, which experienced an alarming 11-point drop, along with Venezuela and Canada — each faced significant declines of eight points in their corruption scores. This, he argued, calls into question the credibility of the index and its implications for assessing governance in Guyana.
“With all of the complex systems in the United States of America in their judiciary, it’s still seen as one of the best in the world. But they lost 4 points on the index. We slipped 1 point, they lost 4 points on the index — slipped 4 points because they complained about some in the judiciary in the United States of America. The same TI Report. So, often, you have to assess these reports in perspective and in their full complexity,” the Vice President has said.
Expressing skepticism about the methodology used to compile the report, Jagdeo suggested that it relies heavily on local opinions that may be biased against the PPP/C government.
He recalled that, during the 2019 report, critical factors such as a no-confidence motion and constitutional violations by the previous administration had been overlooked, undermining the validity of the findings.
The APNU (A Partnership for National Unity), the main opposition party, had faced intense scrutiny over its governance during its tenure from 2015 to 2020. Pointing to several allegations of corruption and mismanagement during that period, including claims that the APNU government had overseen the spending of Gy$419.5 billion without parliamentary oversight, Jagdeo noted that those breaches should have significantly impacted the corruption index, yet they were seemingly ignored in previous reports.
“In 2019, this is what Troy Thomas put in his report to Transparency International; that they use as one of a basis for the improvement that we saw: He said, ‘In recent years, though there’s been a measure of optimism about the potential for a turnaround, this is strongly linked to a change in government that occurred in 2015’. So, this report was sent up in September 2023-2019. It didn’t mention a single word about the no- confidence motion,” Jagdeo highlighted.
“Where, in September 23rd 2019, we were protesting for free and fair elections; pushing the Government to call the elections, and they were refusing; defying the Constitution and the CCJ ruling; not a word about that (appeared in the report). Now, this is transparency globally. Not a word about it in the report,” Dr Jagdeo said.
Moreover, the Vice President argued that the TI report failed to acknowledge APNU’s refusal to cooperate in legislative amendments such as the anti-money laundering law, which he contended contributed to a crisis in governance.
Among the claims made in the TI report, Jagdeo has vehemently denied accusations of corruption within the Government, and has described the negative portrayal of the PPP/C as a distortion of the truth.
“If you are a transparency organization in Guyana, you have a duty to put a report. If you’re putting together a report, and publish it locally and say, ‘We’re sending this report up, so that the people of this country would say, “I wonder if they sent up a report?” I’m wondering now what report they sent up; and trust me, I would not put it past them, because they’re hostile to the PPP, to again send up a negative report like how they whitewashed the whole APNU period based on what I just said in 2019. This is a group of people who are hostile to us,” he added.
In its latest Corruption Perception Index (CPI) report, Transparency International ranked Guyana lower than in its previous CPI by giving it a score of 39. A country’s score is the perceived level of public sector corruption on a scale of 0-100, where 0 means highly corrupt and 100 means very clean.
TI has stated that although the country created anti-corruption institutions and laws, transparency and law enforcement are very low.
President Dr Irfaan Ali has since challenged the organization to base its assessments on empirical data rather than on perception-driven indicators. During a live broadcast held recently, the Head of State called into question the legitimacy of Transparency International’s findings, and argued that the organisation relied on biased sources with clear political motives rather than on verifiable facts.