SPAIN is 40th out of a list of 177 countries on the world 'corruption scale', with number 177 – the most corrupt – being Somalia, according to figures released by a German charity.
Transparency International (TI) publishes the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) every year and has done since 1995 – and this year's results show Spain has fallen 10 places, having been at number 30 in 2012.
Spain has not been this far down the list since 1998.
On a scale of 0-100, with 100 being, literally, '100% corrupt', and 0 being 'completely clean', Spain's score was 59, falling from last year's 65.
Somalia, Afghanistan and North Korea, joint 175th out of the 177 countries, got a score of eight each, compared to the UK's 76, Finland's and Sweden's 89, Norway's 86 and Denmark's 91 – the 'cleanest' country and joint number one along with New Zealand out of 177.
Spain had the second-worst score in western Europe after Italy's 43, and most of eastern Europe fared worse than Spain.
And Spain's score was beaten by 'cleaner' countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Estonia, Qatar, Botswana, Cyprus, Portugal, Israel, Taiwan, Brunei and Poland, and had just one point more than Cabo Verde and Dominica, two more than Lithuania and Slovenia, and three more than Malta.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com