Peter Eigen

Talking to Peter Eigen in the bar of a hotel in Uzbekistan during the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development annual meeting, Euromoney is reminded strongly of the hero of John le Carré's novel The Constant Gardener.

The novel is about a young diplomat in Kenya who turns a blind eye to official corruption in the name of good diplomacy, while his more radical and idealistic wife performs heroic work in the Nairobi slums. Her murder by a multinational pharmaceutical company prompts the diplomat to stop sitting on the fence and start actively campaigning against corruption himself.

Peter Eigen, the German chairman of global NGO Transparency International, started his 10-year fight against corruption in Nairobi, where he worked as head of sub-Saharan Africa for the World Bank. While working at the Bank, he felt keenly the necessity of "having to straddle different points" - trying to help the poor, while also mobilizing the rich, and working with governments that were often, as was the case with that of president Daniel arap Moi in Kenya, riddled with corruption. The Bank's official policy at that time was to keep quiet about corruption. Indeed, says Eigen: "You weren't even allowed to mention the word in reports, even though corruption was destroying everything we did."

His wife, Gutta, meanwhile, was working in the Nairobi slums, where, says Eigen, "you could see how people were damaged, particularly in the health sector". Eigen remembers his wife, who died of cancer a few months ago, very fondly. "She was much less forgiving than I was," he says. "I was willing to be a good soldier. She was always less willing to make compromises. When I was particularly compromising myself, she didn't accept that. At one point, when I was division chief for Latin America, I was in a World Bank meeting on the region while my wife was demonstrating outside against Pinochet."

Eigen decided he needed to do more. He says, in a typically charming variant on an old cliché, that the Bank's anti-corruption efforts at that point were "fiddling on the roof while Rome burned". He wanted to start campaigning against corruption but the Bank said it didn't want him to do it, even in his own time.

So he took early retirement, moved back to Berlin and, with a group of just nine other people, set up Transparency International in May 1993. "At that point", he remembers, "it was largely funded by my pension."

Early on, the founders of the NGO decided it wasn't going to take a confrontational, name-and-shame approach to corruption in emerging markets. Partly, they thought they could achieve more by trying to build a coalition of the willing. And partly it was a safety consideration. As Stian Christensen, a colleague of Eigen's at TI, says: "It's damned dangerous to name names. An abundance of people who have stuck their necks out have literally lost their heads."

The NGO also decided it would establish national chapters run by local people, and that it wouldn't confine itself to private-sector corruption but also cover government corruption.

Since then, the progress of the NGO from fringe outfit to "one of the most important NGOs in the world" (as human rights professor Michael Ignatieff describes it), has been exceedingly quick. In 1995, TI launched its Corruptions Perceptions Index, which is now used by analysts, academics and political risk specialists worldwide.

In 1998, it helped the passage of the OECD's convention on bribery, which was the first piece of international legislation ever on the issue. The New York Times described the fact that 34 countries, including the UK and US, had signed the treaty as a "triumph" for TI. It is now illegal for the first time under UK law for UK companies to bribe foreign government officials.

In the time since the establishment of TI and the passage of the OECD convention, the relationship between the World Bank and TI had changed. James Wolfensohn became head of the World Bank in 1995, and was much more open to TI's anti-corruption message. Indeed, Eigen and others from TI were quickly invited to the Bank to give Wolfensohn and his senior managers a day-long seminar on the topic. And Wolfensohn also engaged Eigen to develop an anti-corruption strategy for the Bank.

Most recently, the NGO has entered into a coalition with several leading banks to combat money-laundering. The initiative, called the Wolfsberg Principles, means the 12 banks, which include all the bulge-bracket banks, commit themselves to "endeavour to accept only those clients whose source of wealth and funds can be reasonably established to be legitimate".

Cynics might claim it is whitewashing, but it at least brings the prominence of the issue again to the notice of bank senior managers.

Eigen, who is now 64, spends most of his time travelling from conferences to meetings with national chapters and government officials.

His early retirement, he says, has turned into the busiest and most challenging phase of his career. But, as the organization celebrates its tenth birthday, he can look with pride and some amazement at the influence it now exercises. Consider its alumni alone - former TI officials now include the president of Nigeria, the prime minister of South Korea, the justice minister of Chile, the first chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and the permanent secretary for governance and ethics in president Mwai Kibaki's post-Moi government in Kenya, where Eigen set out as an anti-corruption crusader.