How many people does it take to fix a broken lavatory in the most corrupt nation on earth? The answer, according to the Bangladesh Telecommunications Company, is 126.

To move some files from one cabinet to another? It takes 256, to judge by the same state-run company's accounts.

In both cases the workers were paid - even though they never existed.

Just two examples of the endemic graft that earned Bangladesh - condemned as a “basket case” by Henry Kissinger in 1971 - the insult of being rated the world's most corrupt nation from 2000 to 2005.

In another infamous case, a single employee of the biggest state gas company pocketed $145 million (£98 million) in bribes over 12 years while on a salary of $100 a month.

All this and more has been exposed since January last year, when the President - backed by the Army - cancelled elections, imposed emergency rule and installed a caretaker Government. The new administration vowed to eradicate corruption and clean up a political system dominated by the feuding women who lead the two main parties: Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina Wajed.

Now the Government has promised to lift the emergency and hold parliamentary elections on December 18, fulfilling its pledge not to cling to power as Bangladesh's past military rulers did. The question is: has the emergency really cleaned up this nation of 150 million? “Not enough,” says Hasan Mashhud Chowdhury, a retired general appointed head of a newly empowered Anti-Corruption Commission in February 2007.

Before the emergency, he said, Bangladesh had become so crooked that people were buying seats in parliament for $1 million each, recouping the investment in bribes and kickbacks. Politics was a contest between the “battling begums” - Mrs Zia and Mrs Wajed - that polarised society and often erupted into violence.

“It became about power at any cost,” General Chowdhury said.

His team - part-funded and trained by Britain - began by detaining about 200 top political figures, including many members of Mrs Zia's last Government and even her son, Tarique Rahman. Police seized millions of pounds' worth of luxury goods ranging from Humvees and Mercedes to exotic pets, including a cheetah and a crocodile.

The public, more than 40 per cent of whom live on less than $1 day, were delighted. So the Government decided to aim for the top - Mrs Zia and Mrs Wajed, who have alternated as Prime Minister and opposition leader since 1991. Mrs Wajed was arrested in July last year and Mrs Zia in September, both for allegations of corruption. For a while it looked as if they would flee into exile or give up politics.

But today the anti-corruption drive appears to have run out of steam.

As domestic and international pressure mounted over the year for the Government to set a date for elections, the begums' lawyers threw up repeated obstacles in the courts. Mrs Wajed was granted bail in June and Mrs Zia and her son followed in September. Both begums are now expected to contest the election.

“That has really sent the wrong signal,” Iftekhar Zaman, head of the Bangladesh office for Transparency International, the corruption watchdog, said. “A lot of people are asking what we've got at the end of the day.”

The Government is still credited with separating the executive from the judiciary, creating a human rights commission and issuing ID cards to the entire electorate.

“Clearly there hasn't been the transformational change that people hoped for, but there have been significant moves forward,” a Western diplomat said.

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