Britain is the most corrupt country in the world?

What do you mean by a developer perspective?

The corruption described is almost entirely contained within the area of high finance; it's not a very corrupt country from the perspective of the average John Bull. It is however quite deferential, which means that power and prestige let you get away with things.

It is indeed. Just take a look at the thoroughly corrupt and secretive process of awarding a train franchise.

I was invovled a couple of times in bidding for the government contracts. Do not have proofs, of course, but the entire design of this system was very open for corruption.

Tax havens, hmm?

So around the world, basically, the good honest career politicians from Argentina to Zambia are going around to profitable businesses saying "hey, nice business you have there! We'd like to take, say, 50% of your profits, if you don't mind, and spend it on our friends - government contractors, public-sector unions and the like. All the donations to our campaign afterward are purely incidental, I assure you, and none of the subsidies or handouts we'll use your money for are vote-buying schemes, none at all. Thanks for your cooperation."

... and the UK provides places where they don't do that, not on the top-line profit anyway. Sure. I can see how having that would be attractive to both legitimate and illegitimate operators. Its net impact on corruption, though, would be a little tricky to sort out.

(Postscript. As I'm being moderated down without comment, I assume that those doing so are those privileged enough to be in a nice low-corruption Western economy where we have a slightly better grade of politician than, say, Dilma Rousseff and her legislature. So I wish to note that despite cynicism about world governments I retain due respect for anti-corporate sentiment as well...)

> The premise is that because corruption involves money and money involves banks and London has lots of banks, transitively, London is very corrupt.

I thought it was based on the premise that:

    London is the drug money laundering capital
    of the world

and:

    90 per cent of drug cash ends up in 
    the US and Europe via London

and:

    criminal corporate activities within the City of
    London which have dominated the headlines 
    over the past decade

and:

    an alternative metric for financial corruption
    [puts Britain and its dependencies] top of the list

and:

    the four companies in line to buy [from the Government]
    the UK Land Registry [which tracks the (often foreign)
    ownership of UK properties] are all based in or have
    close links to the offshore tax havens of Jersey, 
    Cayman Islands or Delaware

> career issue

AKA:

     powerful financial firms will destroy the lives
     and reputations of whistleblowers [claiming] a
     100% success rate

From the BBC page linked to under 100% success rate:

    The BBC spoke to one such whistleblower who wrote
    to the FSA [UK financial services regulator] on
    numerous occasions with his concerns about 
    behaviour at his then-investment bank.

    The FSA refused to act on the information
    and even requested that the whistleblower 
    never contact them again.

If the British Prime Minister is happy to defame other countries by name, then the UK should be prepared to have its own monumental corruption problems put under the spotlight.

This is about financial corruption; corruption in other spheres - police, judiciary and politics - is rife in the UK too.

The only question about whether the UK is the "worst" is whether other so-called open, accountable democracies are any better, which I doubt.

But it's about time we started putting our own house in order, instead of blindly pointing the finger at the usual suspects, poor developing countries, who can only dream of having corruption so established that it's not even referred to as such; and when someone does call it what it is, people instinctively write it off as "idiotic".