"I'm pleased with the different style of work, internally and externally, and with the progress in investigations, strategic oversight, IT support and the commission's analytical capabilities."

"But we're going to have to show much more...We need a breakthrough; if it doesn't happen, I'm either not the right man for the job or the whole concept of the anti-graft institution is misguided or hopeless," he said.

But this depends on the commission itself as well as the institutional, political and legal environment.

He said the commission had "relatively extensive powers to obtain data and in prevention, but it all becomes horribly complicated when we interact with law enforcement and the judiciary."

"Slovenia should decide once and for all whether such an institution needs a much stronger link with the prosecution so that all the cases we are pursuing be handled by prosecutors specialising in corruption."

One of the projects that the commission launched under Klemencic is the web application Supervizor, which allows anyone to track payments by public institutions to private contractors.

Klemencic says he is proud of the project in that it has "changed the paradigm of freedom of information." The application and the upgrades under way "undermine the status quo and the monopoly over information."

One issue that Klemencic has had to confront as the commission head has been his role in the lease of a building for the recently established National Bureau of Investigation (NBI).

Klemencic had been Interior Ministry state secretary at the time of the signing of the lease, which has been found by the Court of Audit and his own commission to have been mired in corruption, and which has led to the resignation of Katarina Kresal, the interior minister.

Klemencic told Delo that he had been involved in the legal basis of the NBI project, but he did not deal with the logistics and other aspects.

"When the then secretary general told me the lease contract was ready...I congratulated him on work well done. In retrospect, that may have been naive," he said.

"When I was the state secretary I asked the minister about these links. She said there were none," added Klemencic, who acknowledges that the NBI controversy was one of the reasons he left the ministry.