As the World Bank's regional director in Nairobi at the end of the 1980s, Mr Peter Eigen realised that corruption was impeding development and destroying the environment.
"At the time, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and development agencies would not even use the word `corruption'," Mr Eigen told a conference on international corruption in Paris yesterday.
"They used euphemisms like `poor accounting'. `Corruption' was avoided like the plague."
Working with African officials, Mr Eigen drew up a set of rules of integrity in Swaziland in 1990. The World Bank's legal office in Washington sent him a letter saying the initiative was illegal and "incompatible with [his] responsibilities", that he was interfering with the sovereignty of memberstates.
Mr Eigen, who is German, resigned from the World Bank and founded Transparency International in 1993.
The raison d'etre of the Berlin-based group is to fight corruption, and it is now financed by western governments, aid agencies and large corporations. Transparency International publishes a yearly index of corruption throughout the world.
Mr Eigen says the group has no means to pursue corrupt individuals. Instead, it tries to reform the political and economic systems that feed corruption.
Thanks to his lobbying, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development is considering a convention on the prevention of corruption.
Attitudes at the World Bank and the IMF have changed since 1996. Unlike past World Bank presidents, its present executive, Mr James Wolfensohn, supports Mr Eigen's crusade. Two themes recurred throughout the day-long colloquium, which was sponsored by the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur at the Sorbonne. The globalisation of markets also means the globalisation of corruption, judges, officials, academics and journalists from Europe, the US and Latin America said. Forty years of cold war, during which western countries gave top priority to the fight against communism, explained the international community's past neglect of the problem.
Mrs Maria Emma Mejia Velez, the former Colombian minister of foreign affairs and the woman who tracked down and imprisoned the Colombian drug magnate, Pablo Escobar, reproached western countries for waking up so late. Latin American military dictatorships had encouraged corruption, she said, but the US supported them because they were anti-communist. In the 1970s, drug-traffickers took root in Colombia, Bolivia and Peru.
"For 20 years drug-trafficking unleashed devastating corruption on the institutions and social values of our nation," Mrs Mejia Velez said. "The cartels got richer thanks to an international financial system that had no qualms about taking their money. In Colombia they killed justice ministers, four presidential candidates, dozens of reporters, hundreds of policemen and judges, and hundreds of thousands of people who got in their way . . .
"There are 91 tax havens around the world where they could stash their money. The secret banking system laundered $500 billion a year to the total complacency of the international community."
Today five of the 10 countries perceived as most corrupt on Mr Eigen's index are in Latin America: the other five are in Africa. The 19 considered least corrupt are developed western countries. But the measurements are deceptive.
Switzerland, which holds the proceeds of much of the world's corruption, is perceived as one of the 10 least corrupt nations.
Mr Lloyd Cutler, a US lawyer and adviser to President Clinton, dismissed the OECD convention advocated by Mr Eigen as "a very nice baby mouse" and said that criminalising bribe-taking would do little to stop it "because it happens in secret between consenting adults with few witnesses".
But Mr Cutler seemed naive as well as cynical. Other countries should imitate US disclosure laws and require employees to swear periodically that they had not paid bribes, he said.
Mr Rene Backman, a French journalist, received loud applause when he said there was a contradiction between the US government's struggle against corruption and its support for corrupt governments friendly to the US.