The head of global anti-corruption NGO will meet with Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and Anti-Corruption Agency director Ahmad Zaki Husi next week.

Dr Peter Eigen, chairman of Berlin-based Transparency International, will also address a businessmen's luncheon talk in Kuala Lumpur on April 11 on "Transparency in International Business: The New Global Challenge".

"Companies all over the world have begun to see that it makes sense to put integrity at the forefront of their strategies, " said Tunku Aziz Tunku Ibrahim, TI vice-chairman as well as president of the KL Society for Transparency and Integrity.

"No longer is integrity the luxury of the virtuous; it is a business necessity," he said in a statement today to announce Eigen's two-day visit to Malaysia from April 10.

Aziz also stated that TI had often praised Malaysia as an example of a country that had responded positively to TI's Corruption Perceptions Index which ranks countries in terms of the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist among public officials and politicians.

The corruption index is a composite index, drawing on 17 different polls and surveys from 10 independent institutions carried among business people, the general public and country analysts.

The [#1] 1999 CPI ranks[/#] , from cleanest to most corrupt, 99 countries. Malaysia just made it to top third, ranked number 32, down from 29 in 1998, with CPI score of 5.1, compared with least corrupt Denmark scoring the maximum 10.0.

Another report "[#2] 1999 TI Bribe Payers Index[/#] (BPI)", ranked Malaysia 15 among the 19 leading exporters in terms of the degree to which the countries are perceived as the homes of corporations paying bribes abroad.

Malaysia registered a BPI score of 3.9 from a scale of zero to 10, putting it one of the worst bribe givers among those surveyed.

Malaysia only performed better than Italy (3.7), Taiwan (3.5), South Korea (3.4) and China (including Hong Kong) at 3.1. Most favourable results came from Sweden (8.3), Australia (8.1) and Canada (8.1).

The BPI was commissioned by TI and conducted by Gallup International in response to the concerns originally expressed by Mahathir that its original corruption index had tended to put the emphasis, unfairly, mostly on developing coountries. The BPI is intended to redress this imbalance.