"In Portugal, despite several initiatives to fight corruption over the last decade - including new legislation, there still is no national strategy in force to combat corruption," reads the first anti-corruption report about EU countries.
The report’s authors state that the application of penalties "in cases of high level corruption, remains a challenge" in Portugal.
The European Commission report suggests that in Portugal "more preventive measures against corrupt practices in party funding should be made and that there should be codes of conduct established for elected officials."
The EC team headed by Portugal’s own Barroso argues that additional efforts must be made to combat conflicts of interest and to promote probity from the local level upwards.
"Transparency and the mechanisms of control over the procedures for awarding public contracts should be strengthened. Portugal should identify the risk factors of corruption in local urban planning decisions," read the document with an observation that could have been written for the Algarve’s mayors.
The reports is telling Portugal’s electorate nothing new but does point out that the EU mandarins are aware that Portugal is a corrupt country.
The same study underlines the importance of ensuring that enforcement authorities, prosecutors and courts are all prepared to deal effectively with often complex cases of corruption.
The EC presented the results of two opinion polls on corruption in Portugal, one survey revealed that 90% of the Portuguese agree that corruption is widespread in the country.
However, less than 1% of the Portuguese had direct experience with corruption. This is seen as a good result as the EU is 4% but about a third of the Portuguese nation considers that they are affected by corruption in their day-to-day lives.
The Portuguese believe that corruption makes it easier to obtain certain public services (79%) and that the only way to succeed in business is through political connections (76%) - values that are well above the European Union average which is 69% and 47% respectively.
These opinions are shared by Portugal’s business community as over 66% of its national companies admit that corruption is an obstacle to their business. The average value in the EU is 43%.
See also: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/03/us-eu-corruption-idUSBREA120KN20140203
