"If we are not careful we could end up with 30 to 40 percent of the funding not going to the projects in these areas," said Huguette Labelle, a French-Canadian elected on Sunday to succeed Peter Eigen at the head of the respected Berlin-based body.

In an interview with AFP on Tuesday, Labelle identified the countries which were devastated by the South Asian tsunami in December and also hurricane-hit Central America as major causes of concern.

"There are hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into reconstruction in these areas," she said, adding that much of that was international funding.

Labelle stressed that "although I am not saying that corruption is definitely taking place" in areas recovering from natural disasters, "the potential was there" for diverting the funds before they reached their intended target.

Every year, Transparency publishes the Global Corruption Report and the Corruption Perception Index, a league table of the most corrupt countries in the organisation's view.

To compile the survey, Transparency asks businesspeople, public officials and academics about how they perceive countries in which they live or do business.

This year Chad and Bangladesh were ranked the most corrupt, with Iceland and Finland the 'cleanest'.

Transparency has a wide focus -- in recent days alone it has called for records from the investigation of the scandal-ridden Iraq Oil for Food Programme to be safeguarded, and has condemned draft legislation in Russia which it says "promotes discrimination against non-governmental organisations and the rights of foreign organisations and citizens".

But do governments really listen to what Transparency says?

"We make sure they do. And countries double check where they are (in the index)," Labelle said.

"We have a number of instruments we use in order to increase awareness and we try to use these instruments in as many places as we can."

These include offering assistance to countries in carrying out reviews of key institutions, for example the judiciary, in an attempt to eliminate corruption.

Immediately after the interview, Labelle was taking a flight to China, where Transparency is hoping to open an office, or a chapter as the organisation calls it.

"There is already a small group of people in China who are talking about forming a chapter," Labelle said.

"They are from an academy of science. I know China well and my experience of working with people from the academies of science on environmental issues is that they are able to get things moving."

Labelle, a former president of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and current Chancellor of the University of Ottawa, also hailed the work done by Transparency in recent years in mineral-rich areas of Africa to eliminate corrupt practices in the extraction industry.

"We have done a lot of work with the extracting companies in the hope that they will become champions with us," she said.

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