There is no sign of serious corruption in the public and private sectors of Hong Kong, the anti-corruption department of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) said Monday.

Responding to the results of a survey by the Control Risks group, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) said Hong Kong has strong anti-corruption laws that the agency vigorously and effectively enforces.

Control Risks is an independent, specialist risk consultancy with 18 offices on five continents. It published Monday a report on corruption, titled "International Business Attitudes to Corruption -- Survey 2006," saying corruption remains a huge worldwide problem for business.

Hong Kong's ICAC said the survey sample size was small, while the results in regard to Hong Kong's perceived corruption situation are inconsistent with a number of other authoritative regional and international surveys that have found Hong Kong has a clean and fair business environment.

Among the 11,000 business executives surveyed in the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report 2006, a vast majority did not consider corruption a problematic factor for doing business in Hong Kong.

The Corruption Perceptions Index, released by the Berlin-based Transparency International on Oct. 18 last year, ranked Hong Kong the 15th least corrupt place of 159 places surveyed. In this index, 12 regional and international surveys were used to assess Hong Kong's perceived corruption situation.

Meanwhile, about 95 percent of more than 1,500 respondents in last year's ICAC annual survey said they had not come across corruption in the past 12 months.