The report spans 77 different indicators applied to evaluate the level of vulnerability to corruption and ranking the risk of each country on a scale of A – low risk to F – critical risk.


Portugal turned in a grade D in the overall corruption risk and an E in terms of operational procurement corruption and gaining the same risk level grades as Armenia and the Ukraine.


"Portugal is far from the best international patterns for transparency, supervision and accountability as regards the defence sector” report researcher Luís Bernardo told Lusa stating that the findings were a “warning to political leaders and senior military officials to engage in an urgent debate on boosting integrity in this sector.”


Portugal was one of the nine participants in the report that failed to respond to a request for comment by Transparency International with Bernardo adding that both the Ministry of Defence and the Armed Forces retained “a culture of opacity and secrecy.”


The report identifies “the lack of supervision over arms exports alongside the failure to strategically plan the procurement of equipment which leads to the taking of arbitrary decisions and multiple corruption risks.”


However, Portugal was far from alone in ranking badly in the report with NATO displaying “a systematic failure” in anti-corruption training with only the United States, the United Kingdom and Greece turning in B grades in the ranking.