Liberty, free and equal competition for economics, democracy and alike values depend on transparency to work well. Lately, multiple social systems include interesting tools to discover where it's necessary to look for setbacks against it. There are basic failures tough, since the usual state of evolution after feudal estates, monarchies and individual affairs —sometimes afternoon caprices— to create legislation were replaced for a questionable type of democracy, better but where everyone could be a person with great responsibilities, deciding for others' life without a mere qualification more than to be older than a certain age and having the nationality. At least in the most part in contemporary constitutions.
That means the population chooses between a little group of political parties, with a solid number of militants making almost impossible to create a serious opposition. At least until today, as Internet can show those serious drawbacks with the eventuality of letting other entities reach political functions at the highest position. It could be interesting to see very young individuals, "pirates" or who knows and having the power to be the hierarchical superior. Some of this is not very rare in history, even today specially in cases of dynasties although mostly from non democratic perspectives.
Transparency asks for methods of control, for politicians, market entities, religions or sects —call like you want it—, and this is usually done by legislation and the judicial sector. Even this last one could experience cases of corruption, then without other instances of control the problems aren't completely solved. When the Administration needs to approve expenses, that should go in a law for being approved by the Parliament or similar structures. Every judgment nowadays must be written and with free access by the public, with exceptions if the observer looks toward tribes or other ancient civilizations. These two alone are good indicators, perfect to instantiate public awareness thanks to the press, and also reclaiming help of other judicial instances at the international level.
How it be, when a political estate has the ability to create legislation without asking the democracy perhaps giving it the possibility of interacting with experts to promote changes or block oddities, any unethical law might promote a critical block for prosecuting acts against good faith, giving chance to lucrative, private interests without the public benefit as the maximum priority. It should be this way since the society is sustained by the work of the democracy, who also pays taxes and expects in return.
A frequent example of the aforementioned topic is when the Administration reserves the right for starting investigations against who doesn't respect the law for instance eluding taxes. If the choice needs to be made by a political appointment in a temporal basis, there's a possible flaw and with great proportions. So any illicit behavior for other countries could be simply masked as legal in that place.