https://www.justice.gov/criminal-fraud/foreign-corrupt-pract...
https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2014/06/17/the-fcpas-fa...
Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/01/donald-trump-bribery...
You sure?
I mean, I agree with you that "every company" is certainly hyperbole, but bribery happens on different scales. Its not all national level and involving 6+ figure sums.
I know someone who worked at a local restaurant where the owner bribed someone at the local health inspection office to be tipped off before "random inspections" giving them a couple of days notice to get things sorted out prior to the inspection.
I suspect companies committing bribery are the minority, but it can and does happen at the local small-business level.
How would you know? Maybe he gives his meat guy generous "tips" to bring him fresher meat than the deli down the street
It would be more surprising if that were actually true.
It needs approval from the building inspector, the fire marshal, and the health department. Unless there's a yellow curb or a loading dock, it needs the police to look the other way while its suppliers' trucks park illegally during unloading.
There are many politicians and bureaucrats with discretion over whether it gets to exist. Most of the time, those people probably act in good faith. But they absolutely could shake down the owner if they wanted to, or accept a bribe for lax enforcement. Or the departments could be so short-staffed that it'll be years for an approval unless an interested politician escalates on your behalf.
Good luck running a small business in Chicago while not on friendly terms with your alderman.
That may be true, but Deli are also often the target of vendors, distributors for kickbacks. They may not have bribed anyone, but they could also have been bribed.
Do you think Mr General/President/Leader of 3rd world country looks at merit/quality only?
Then it's an issue of "complying" with the informal regulations or not selling
Does it matter? Airbus is being punished for what Airbus did. If other companies also misbehaved, that doesn't suddenly mean that Airbus didn't break the law and shouldn't be punished.
It's the difference between a justice system and mob rule.
Something about 5,000 jobs, ₤6 billion, and - of course - upset Saudi princes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Yamamah_arms_deal#Serious_F...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Greek_bribery_scandal
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/LIVE-the-israeli-submari...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-41109132
And a longer list mixed with money laundering https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/25_corruption_scan...
https://www.reuters.com/article/snc-lavalin-court/update-3-c...
As for solution - not sure. It seems this is defense case so more transparency might not be an option
Any place riddled with bribery is one where government has far too little authority and individuals ostensibly working for it are running rampant.
Authority is not exactly the same thing as power though.
So nobody went to jail, though
It just so happens that the lobbyists that get the most attention are those that represent the most powerful groups. But equating it with bribery is completely misleading.
Where is this meme coming from? It surfaced recently (from the progressive echo-chamber maybe?) as a fact when it's a complete distortion.
Lobbying: Senator, my clients would like that the recent changes in the tax code stay as they are but the deduction on ....is increased. (maybe a dinner or a small campaign contribution, as other lobbyists will oppose this one)
Very, very different.
What is with this demented obsession on HN with sending people to jail?
The response to any misbehaviour is 'send someone to jail!'
Nobody even seems particularly concerned who goes to jail - it's usually just 'someone needs to do to jail for this.'
Perhaps it'll happen. :)
Especially in the EU, where our criminal justice systems aren’t nearly as unreasonable as in the US.
So that's why there are custodial sentences for bribery.
This is not an easy thing though: the countries in which bribes are paid are run by corrupt people who expect kickbacks as part of doing business, and there's no other way about it.
If the West wants to play morally superior on this - then 100% of Airbus, Boeing, SNC, Halliburton and massive industrials will full-on go out of business.
This issue is not part of the current round of negotiations with China and it's too bad, because without a level playing field - many industries will be wiped out and other countries will be happy to pick up the slack.
This stuff is quite common, we need a comprehensive solution.
One indirect approach might be to invest and push for open journalism in places like Malaysia, so as to force their own hand on corruption though that may be asking too much.
Because they are paying bribes.
It's rampant, and almost out in the open.
Major Western corporations keep 'sunshine funds' off the books, in offshore companies, for bribes high and low.
'Bribery' as we call it, is normative in most of the world, and it's how it works.
And this is not just corrupt leaders, it's anyone in a position to benefit, from bottom to top.
As I said: the issue is how the Western public is going to deal with this information coming to light because they're completely naive to what's going on.
>Somehow
At least in cases of SNC and Halliburton, "somehow" was by doing the illegal thing.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/17/kudlow-white-house-is-lookin...
But of all the industries, big planes should be among the easiest to clean up: there’s only two participants in this prisoners‘ dilemma, and they are both, theoretically, under the purview of rigorous enforcement in countries governed by law.
What? No.
There are 1000's of participants, and few of them are under the purview of the law.
1. Someone wants access to a Malaysian Air exec at some hotel event. Bribe someone for info.
2. Someone is overseeing the aircraft regulatory body, their findings will sway one way or another. Bribe them.
3. Someone is drafting legislation to support the state-sponsored purchase of aircraft. Bribe them.
4. The brother of the 'deciding individual' at Malaysian Air hints he can help access. Bribe them.
5. The people responsible for lower-level contractual affairs are putting up a fuss over some little details? Bribe them.
6. The 'respected international consultancy' is putting together the business plan for the national airline strategy. Bribe them.
7. The executives making the purchase want a kickback. Bribe them.
These bribes come in all forms, some of them more or less legal, or more or less ethical - depending on the law.
Does giving the son of the Malay MP drafting relevant legislation a job at Airbus constitute a bribe? Or just congeniality?
Does flying in a team of officials for an all-expenses-paid, swanky getaway at a high-end swiss resort for 'a meeting' constitute a bribe?
In the West, a lot of this happens in fuzzier ways, borderline ethical. In other countries, it's just how business is done.
In other places, like Nigeria, it's pretty straight forward. Once you get to the Nigerian Minister of Natural Resources, he will have spelled out for you by people in his periphery beforehand nature and expected size of the bribe, how it gets transmuted so that nothing 'impolite' happens directly in his presence.
If you're an American IT company that has support offices in the Middle East and Africa that subcontracts the work to local companies, but then wants to end such contracts in favor of direct hires ... and said subcontractors are connected - you will 'pay a bribe' out of the sunshine fund.
If you're IKEA and want to open a store in Moscow, you will pay x% of your revenue to a local 'businessman/thug'. If not - no store! So you wait a decade and realize you have no choice, and so you just pay the appropriate tributes.
Again - the issue is how the plebes in the West are going to react when they start to learn how everything is working.
The only way to 'end' this is to have a lot of various powers on board, and it's going to be different in every country.
It might work out differently in every country, and maybe at different levels of scale, or happen in a different way, i.e. instead of 'kickbacks', execs get lucrative contracts somewhere else or some other kind of benefit.
This will take a few centuries to sort out.
Edit: to be clear I'm not advocating at all for any of these shenanigans.
Not only are you describing the situation accurately, you are not advocating that the West just pay bribes as well.
At a basic level I think it falls down to fundamentally different conceptions of what is a "business" versus individuals, families, organizations of many types. What we call "lie" and "theft" in the West might be innocuous or praised in the East (think "great poker player", "bold move"), and no regulation will make each side suddenly re-order their hierarchy of values, and the centennial legal system that surely goes with it.
I don't know where the solution lies, if any, but that's one hell of a cultural clash.
That is not the same as more coincidental, opportunistic bribery the likes of dictatorships or local lords, the chaos tax. That's more of a temporary friction that can (and should) be dealt with more swiftly — had we the global political will to do so. It's nowhere near as hard a problem as the above cultural matter.
Edit: self-censored a bad initial
If you can't survive as an honest company you don't deserve to survive.
And there are very few people that give the government as many screws as executives to modify their behavior.
It seems like they did more than 6 months. Their profits for the first half of 2019 were €2.53B[1], the fines for this were €3.6B.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/airbus-more-than-doubles-hal...
A particularly nasty aspect of this story, alluded to at the bottom but not made explicit, is that Airbus was taking massive export credits (in the UK, they got the lion's share of the budget).
It was only in the UK that Airbus was required to actually required to produce documentation about the customer, and the scheme was only uncovered when someone at UKEF realised that Airbus wasn't doing this and the govt had been giving out hundreds of millions to corrupt politicians.
Also, the timeline here is incredible. As soon as the UK announced their investigation, and Airbus was banned from receiving credits...they were in negotiations to resume funding, and (somehow) Enders only lost his job 3 years later (and even the UK has turned back on the money spigot...although this time with sheepish promises about trying to fund a company other than Airbus through UKEF).
Airbus is everything that is wrong with the corporate world. Run by politicians, hopelessly corrupt, always spinning, and receiving massive subsidies by dint of their impact on local job markets.
But it makes planes that don't crash like Boeings.
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2003/06/12/airbuss-...
Maybe people here have never heard the EU point of view on it, so let me sum it up: Airbus bribed Saudi officials in the 90s to get a 6 billion contracts. It was "whistleblowed" by this then little-known agency: NSA and in the end Boeing got the contract. It triggered a EU investigation in what was then called ECHELON. A Cold-war era spying network that was being repurposed for economic intelligence.
Airbus defense was that in Saudi Arabia, nothing gets done without corruption and Boeing probably did the same, but of course, EU had no interceptions to prove it.
I often argue that Snowden told us very little new information and that the EU kney most of this since 2001. I don't understand why it took 15 years to become a public concern.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/EPRS/EPRS_STUDY_538877_Affair...
So yeah not great & but relatively speaking I can't say I particularly care
So yeah, everyone should care.
And this happen just when Boeing is in trouble.
Airbus runs 'massive' bribery scheme -> Airbus wins more orders -> Boeing feels pressure of losing orders -> Boeing execs pressure engineers to cut corners -> Boeing aircraft develop various major safety issues
