A very interesting op-ed by Patti Waldmeir in yesterday's FT about how corruption has become so much hard work and people are needing to get much more creative these days. I quote:
Bribery is not what it used to be: these days it is too much like hard work. The man in the safari suit can no longer just hand over a bagful of cash; corruption has had to get creative.
Paying for prostitutes is obviously outré, and Swiss bank accounts are so 1970s. For most even half-reputable US multinationals, paying a bribe these days means evading armies of accountants and auditors, deceiving dozens of lawyers and compliance officers, and fooling the born-again anti-bribery fundamentalists who enforce America’s dreaded Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (not to mention the Chinese or Nigerian fraud squads).
For oil companies in some countries, there may be no reasonable alternative to bakshish; but other companies in other countries must ask themselves: is corruption worth the cost? This is not a moral question – on a strict calculus of risks and rewards, bribery may be too high a cost of doing business.
The consternation in the room was palpable, as Mark Mendelsohn, the top FCPA enforcement official at the US justice department, and Cheryl Scarboro, who holds the same position at the Securities and Exchange Commission, outlined the new rules for companies operating in the world’s corruption hot-spots. One plaintive questioner asked: what is a company to do if it operates in a country where corruption is a way of doing business? “Maybe that’s a place you shouldn’t be doing business,” said Ms Scarboro, provoking an aggrieved splutter about naive bureaucrats with no experience of commercial realpolitik from the businessman sitting next to me.
“The government is not completely unrealistic about what it’s like to do business in some parts of the world,” says Bruce Yannett of law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. The consensus among the legal experts at the conference was: spend lots of money training employees, monitoring local business partners, auditing foreign operations, launching dawn raids and surprise audits to make sure no one is disguising bribes as travel expenses – and you should just about survive. Paying bribes these days is just too costly.
You know what? I totally agree. Now this took balls and this is very brave work. Hats off to the American Government.
I do wish our government could do this, but I am afraid this current British Government lacks the balls as well as the intelligence to see that pandering to corruption is morally degrading and bad for business.
Simple, if you have to pay corruption, get out of that country and if you have to pay to be in business, then get out of that business. Do not care, you dont have to play in the gutter and if the world has become a gutter, then come inside and read a book.
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