Big oil good, finance and tech bad

By The Economist online

Which companies are the most—and least—open in their dealings?

MANY of the world’s biggest firms commit to obeying anti-corruption laws. But what they do not say can be informative too. Transparency International, a watchdog, studied publicly available information about the world’s 105 biggest listed companies as a measure of their commitment to anti-corruption. It looked at public declarations to stay within the law, the degree to which companies disclose their organisational structure and the amount of information they release on a country-by-country basis. Declarations may be just words but they tie a firm’s actions to its reputation. Organisational structure and country-by-country reporting provide useful information about flows of money and about what companies are reluctant to reveal. Firms working in extractive industries are among the most open. Companies registered in Europe and America, both of which have strict anti-corruption laws, also tend to score higher. Less intuitively, technology companies and firms from Japan are well represented at the lower reaches of the table. But it is financial-services companies and companies from Russia or China that scored the worst.