International

Bribing their way to contracts

By Amit Baruah

SINGAPORE MAY 15 . Corporations from Russia, China, Taiwan and South Korea are paying heavy bribes in developing countries to do business, the Bribe Payers Index (BPI) 2002, released by Transparency International (TI), said today.

A statement by the TI Chairman, Peter Eigen, said the new survey also revealed that "large numbers of multinational corporations from the richest nations are pursuing a criminal course to win contracts in the leading emerging markets of the world".

A TI release quoted Mr. Eigen as saying that companies from Russia and China were using bribes on an "exceptional and intolerable scale. The extent to which companies from Taiwan and South Korea use bribes is only marginally less."

The BPI showed that American multinational corporations had a high propensity to pay bribes to foreign Government officials.

"The U.S. score of 5.3 out of a best possible clean 10 is matched by Japanese companies and is worse that the scores for corporations from France, Spain, Germany, Singapore and the United Kingdom," it said.

The "corruption survey" was conducted in the 15 "emerging market economies", including India.

A total of 835 interviews were carried out between December 2001 and March 2002, principally with senior executives of domestic and foreign companies. Of the 21 countries rated, Australia, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Canada and the Netherlands had a score of eight and above — making them the six "cleanest" companies in the BPI.

The TI advisory council Chairman, Kamal Hossain, was quoted as saying by the TI release that "The BPI results signal the rejection by multinational firms of the spirit of international anti-bribery conventions, while their actions lead to a huge misallocation of very scarce resources in developing countries.

The data also points to very heavy bribe-paying by domestic firms in developing countries. Today's BPI underscores the fact that we have a global problem of corporate bribe-paying".

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