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Copyright © International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). All rights reserved. ( Source of the document: ICC Digital Library )
by Iohann Le FrapperChief Legal Officer at GBI
This Chapter focuses on the demand side of bribery. We explore here the role of business in resisting and denouncing all forms of bribe solicitation and extortion. Demands for bribes can come in many forms. They typically occur at the pre-sales and bidding stage of a project, but also in the context of project implementation and day-to-day operations. We stress the importance of training, notably through the use of the RESIST scenarios, a practical tool designed to help employees prevent and respond to inappropriate demands in the most efficient and ethical way. The B20 proposal for a High-Level Reporting Mechanism, if appropriately implemented, could constitute another useful resource for companies to rely on when faced with bribe solicitation.
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Fighting corruption is one of the core components of corporate responsibility and good corporate governance. Companies have an important role to play in supporting government initiatives to combat corruption and taking appropriate steps to prevent illicit and unethical business practices from taking place.
The strengthening of anti-corruption and anti-money laundering laws, the increase of public investigations, the growing number of shareholder and competitor suits coming on top of government bribery prosecutions, the risk for managers of spending time in jail or losing their jobs and, last but not least, the reputational and brand impact of media coverage of bribery-related developments (with immediate and worldwide coverage in our digital society) make a compelling case for companies to work against passive as well as active corruption.
The role of business in the fight against corruption revolves around two distinct but complementary priorities:
This Chapter focuses on the latter aspect of the business fight against corruption, namely how to resist solicitation and extortion.
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Many companies, including those that have implemented robust compliance programmes, report that they continue to face direct or indirect demands for bribes. While they generally resist such attempts, some companies admit being tempted at times to acquiesce in these demands due to their frequency and the insistence of bribe-askers. They think, often erroneously, that giving in to bribe demands under these circumstances can be justified as an acceptable response to extortion.
A demand for a bribe may or may not be accompanied by a threat. But it is important to bear in mind that if a bribe demand or request is accompanied by a threat, this will only be a valid defense to a bribery prosecution if one was acting under necessity or duress, or when the health, security, or safety of a company employee or agent was at risk. In other words, a purely verbal or psychological threat, not accompanied by any pressure on the health, safety, or security of the person concerned, will not be considered as a sufficient defense by a judge or a prosecutor.
In Chapter 4 (‘Glossary’), we have examined the definitions of solicitation and extortion, while taking note of the relevant provisions from the ICC Rules on Combating Corruption (2011).
Certain legal instruments refer to solicitation and extortion as ‘passive corruption’. This expression gives the wrong impression that the person requesting or demanding a bribe is just at the receiving end of the transaction. In many instances, however, the ‘passively’ corrupt person will often be very active and may even make strenuous efforts to obtain a bribe.
It is also worth noting that both extortion and solicitation are criminally sanctioned but the sanctions applicable to extortion may differ from those applicable to solicitation.
Although bribe solicitation and extortion are daily challenges for business, they received only minimal attention in the early international anti-corruption instruments. The OECD Convention (1997), which was structured on the United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (1977), is mainly directed against the ‘supply side’ of bribery. The idea of the drafters of the OECD Convention was that if they succeeded in stopping the supply side of corruption (mainly originating from Western developed countries), demand would naturally taper off.
Things have changed, however, in the years following the adoption of the OECD Convention. Several explicit provisions of the United Nations Convention (2003) prohibit ‘passive’ corruption in both the public and the private sector. Even before 2003, requests or demands for bribes were widely prohibited by national laws. It should also be stressed that the frequency of prosecutions for requesting or demanding a bribe has dramatically increased in recent years.
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This evolution towards embracing both the supply and the demand of bribes is reflected in the recent OECD document entitled Good Practice Guidance on Internal Controls, Ethics, and Compliance, also referred to as Annex II to the OECD Recommendation of the Council for Further Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (2010)24. The Guidance calls the business community:
Regardless of their size, many companies face solicitation or extortion when doing business abroad. Although endemic corruption is often associated with emerging markets, media reports show that industrialized countries are not immune from corrupt practices. In particular, the funding of political parties remains a cause of corruption in many OECD countries.
In certain countries, the demand side of corruption may not stem from greed but from the need for low-level officials with low wages to maintain a decent standard of living. In today’s challenging economic times, the temptation for a public official to solicit a kickback (to increase or maintain his or her family’s standard of living) may even increase. Likewise, it will be particularly tempting for a sales manager to pay a bribe in order to meet yearly sales targets (and secure bonus entitlements, if not a career move or promotion).
Unfortunately, recent surveys show that a significant number of managers, including company executives, still believe that paying a bribe can be justified as a necessary evil to win business in certain countries. They see bribes as a ‘cost of doing business’, particularly if the business transaction at stake is needed to reach strategic corporate objectives.
The lack of a level playing field in many industries raises very valid concerns when competitors (eager to gain market share or to enter new markets) use bribes to secure the award of a project or to lock in a preferred business relationship. Bribes also sometimes are paid to influence bidding requirements, whether technical or otherwise.
As a compliance officer, in the course of your ethics and compliance training sessions, you will often hear comments like: “Our competitors are doing it” or “We just lost a strategic project in a key market because our competitor bribed the decision-makers.” It will be your task to explain in crystal clear terms why your company refuses to pay bribes and has chosen to resist solicitation and extortion.
In doing so, you should not restrict yourself to a mere ‘rules-based’ position (“Paying a bribe to a public official is against the law”). Try to[Page127:]explain the reasons why the company rejects all forms of corruption, including under the guise of solicitation. It will be particularly telling for your audience to hear concrete examples of the dire consequences stemming from unethical business practices for your company and your industry at large. Using examples will not only allow you to capture the attention of your audience, but also to make sure that your colleagues understand that paying a bribe can lead to serious consequences for the company as well as for themselves as individuals.
At the bidding stage of a project, a company that declines solicitation will be faced with the risk of losing a specific business opportunity or facing a de facto ban from a particular customer, if not outright exclusion from the market or country at stake. We will see in Chapter 17 (Managing the Transition to a Clean Commercial Policy), how to face the risk of losing business.
Solicitation may also occur at the implementation stage of a project. Once a company is awarded a contract, it needs to invest significant resources to deliver the products or services promised to the customer. In such a context, it may be exposed to various types of pressure from different stakeholders. For instance:
With the return on project investment at stake, it will be very challenging for a field project manager to reject a demand for a bribe, knowing that he or she is accountable for the timely and successful commissioning of large infrastructure, such as a power plant, or the implementation of an important service package, such as a software solution. Pressure on managers to achieve results may further increase when the variable portion of their compensation is significant.
Business leaders, regulators and commentators generally agree that companies need to be proactive in their efforts to combat corruption. The companies that are known to have a strong policy against bribery tend to experience less extortion and solicitation than others. A refusal to deviate from such firm standing may be relatively easier to achieve for a large company than for a small- or medium-sized enterprise, whose financial credit worthiness might be at stake if the collection of one large outstanding payment is critical to meet its financial commitments towards its banks.
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As we have seen in Chapter 9 (‘The Compliance Challenge for Smaller Enterprises’), smaller businesses are more vulnerable to solicitation than larger companies, in part because they tend to have fewer resources to prevent corruption. They are often newcomers in exposed international markets who have not yet established a track record of resistance to solicitation. As smaller companies generally have less diverse income streams than their larger counterparts, the threat that may come with a bribe solicitation can be extremely destabilizing.
Several companies have acknowledged that, when confronted with endemic corruption in certain markets, they came to the conclusion that doing business in a specific country was no longer a worthwhile option. Such assessment is based on a thorough analysis of business benefits versus legal, financial, and reputational risks. Some companies have chosen to withdraw from certain countries, although they were aware that by doing so they opened the door to competitors with lower ethical and compliance standards.
A decision to stop doing business in an excessively ‘high-risk’ country is not necessarily a permanent one. A company may be able to capitalize on its withdrawal when, several years later, it comes back to that country and touts its ‘no-bribe policy’ as a competitive advantage, while stressing its ability to sell products and services based solely on pricing and innovation, quality or reliability, without hidden costs.
For many years, ICC has urged companies to resist demands for bribes and stressed the benefit of using training tools such as RESIST (Resisting Extortion and Solicitation in International Transactions)25 to identify practical ethical responses to dilemmas.
Based on real-life scenarios, RESIST is designed to provide practical guidance for company employees on how to prevent and respond to an inappropriate demand by a customer, business partner, or public official in the most efficient and ethical way, recognizing that such a demand may be accompanied by a threat.
Within companies, this training tool is mainly directed to:
RESIST is the result of a successful partnership among four major international organizations involved in the fight against corruption:
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In addition to these four sponsors, it is worth noting that the main contributors were anti-corruption specialists from European, North American, and African companies. Since the launch of this joint initiative in 2007, RESIST has gained growing visibility and traction beyond the rather closed circle of anti-corruption experts and organizations involved in the fight against corruption. RESIST is available in six languages: English, French, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, and German.
Reflecting the normal life-cycle of projects, the RESIST tool is made up of two sections:
RESIST consists of:
Each of the 22 scenarios addresses two basic questions in a concrete and specific manner:
The Annex includes a series of good practice recommendations that can apply to most situations. Users of RESIST should study the generic recommendations before reviewing the individual scenarios. Responses to the dilemmas that are presented in the toolkit usually comprise individual company responses as well as some form of collective action.
The RESIST toolkit was designed as a ‘Public Good’. As such it has the following features:
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THE TRAINING TOOLKIT ‘ERESIST’
On the initiative of ICC France, several companies contributed to the design and development of ‘eRESIST’, an on-line training toolkit based on the RESIST scenarios. This free of charge, interactive online training tool meets the needs of companies that seek to train their teams on the risks of corrupt practices and to prepare them to resist inappropriate requests. This training tool includes an initial programme of 10 modules chosen from the 22 RESIST scenarios. It offers a modern method of training that emphasizes proximity, interactivity, and accessibility to all teams, wherever they are located. The toolkit is available on the ICC France website (http://www. icc-france.fr/). It will be released initially in two languages (French and English) but the application will enable translation into other languages.
The ICC Rules on Combating Corruption (2011) recommend that each enterprise choose, as part of an efficient corporate compliance programme, the procedures that are the best adapted to its particular circumstances. Each enterprise also is urged to ensure proper prevention against corruption and to support collective action, for example by proposing or supporting anti-corruption pacts relating to specific projects, or by taking part in anti-corruption initiatives with the public sector and industry peers.
Although the responses provided in the RESIST toolkit may apply to all companies, the solutions proposed should not be implemented ‘as is’ in the field. As for any proper compliance programme, each company should determine how each recommendation can be adapted to its needs, taking into account its size, industry, countries of operation, and the exact nature of the solicitation or extortion attempt.
Cultural considerations should not be ignored. The way a staff member negatively responds to a bribe demand, which may have been expressed in a more or less subtle manner by an intermediary, does not have to be the same and depends on the country’s culture. A standard and straightforward “no” answer, without proper explanation, may be perceived as very offensive if, for example, the solicited manager lives in the country concerned and feels exposed to retaliation such as physical threats. Again, if there is a demonstrable risk of physical retaliation, there will be virtually no risk of prosecution under the main anti-corruption laws.
The recommendations provided in the RESIST toolkit, whether generic or specific to a scenario, emphasize the need to explain to the soliciting person why solicitation and its acceptance can expose both persons and their organizations to prosecution. Moreover, the safety of your colleagues, agents or representatives either living in the country or on a business trip should be of paramount importance to the company and its stakeholders.
There are multiple real-life examples where a project manager or field engineer may be stopped on the road by police or military officials who may request a small cash payment in exchange for the release of their confiscated passports or other personal belongings. Such a threat will normally not qualify as a defense to a bribery prosecution or discourage a bribery prosecution from being initiated in the first place. However, in some extreme situations the threat may expose an employee’s life or physical integrity, and in that case it will be possible to invoke a defense to prosecution.
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It is also worth noting the recent and growing trend of ‘collective action’ initiatives either through specific industry initiatives or multi-industry coalitions with a view to:
Competing bidders intending to cooperate in resisting solicitation should first seek legal advice to ensure that such cooperation does not violate applicable antitrust or procurement laws. ‘Integrity pacts’ were developed by Transparency International to enhance a level playing field and record the undertaking by all bidders and the customer not to offer or pay bribes to win a call for tenders.
Some real-life examples of solicitation and extortion:
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Companies have a duty to prevent corruption. Now the question is: Do they also have an obligation to denounce the solicitation or extortion of bribes? The answer to this apparently innocent question is not easy. Companies may be reluctant to name individuals or groups since their attempt to solicit or extort can only be evidenced in very rare circumstances.
The past few years have witnessed a multiplication of proposals to create channels to report on bribe solicitation via different means. Such proposals were initiated by:
The business community has continuously expressed its strong interest in finding concrete, appropriate and effective means to address the demand side of corruption. It therefore comes as no surprise that the B20 Working Group on Improving Transparency and Anti-Corruption repeatedly called on G20 Leaders to support the development of collective action and sector-based initiatives to combat solicitation. One concrete proposal has been to establish an appropriate form of a High-Level Reporting Mechanism to address allegations of solicitation of bribes by public officials.
The High-Level Reporting Mechanism proposed by the B20 offers an efficient answer to address the issue of bribe solicitation. This is going to be one of the most challenging topics on the global anti-corruption agenda for the years to come. The proposed specifics of the High-Level Reporting Mechanism are as follows:
For governments:
For companies:
The proposed reporting mechanism represents an innovative approach to dealing with the demand side of bribery. Unfortunately, while this reporting mechanism is an interesting solution to prevent corruption, companies reporting solicitation may still face retaliation in the form of harassment, threats, or firing and it will always be possible that their disclosures will be ignored.
Moreover, some countries are still unwilling to introduce comprehensive whistleblower legislation to protect those who speak up and to ensure that their claims are properly investigated. In such circumstances, companies, public bodies, and non-profit organizations should introduce adequate mechanisms for internal reporting.
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It should be noted, however, that the proposed High-Level Reporting Mechanism has also raised some serious and legitimate objections:
About the author
Iohann Le Frapper is the Chief Legal Officer of GBI, a Gulf-based telecom carrier. Prior to his current position, Mr. Le Frapper was the General Counsel Networks group at Alcatel-Lucent. Since 2004 he has gained significant experience in designing and implementing compliance policies. In 2009, Mr. Le Frapper was appointed chair of the RESIST project, a business ethics training toolkit jointly sponsored by the International Chamber of Commerce, the World Economic Forum/Partnering Against Corruption Initiative, Transparency International and the United Nations Global Compact. In 2013, Mr. Le Frapper became Vice-Chair of the ICC Commission on Corporate Responsibility and Anti-corruption. He is also a member of the global Board of Directors of the Association of Corporate Counsel.
24 http://www.oecd.org/daf/ca/corporategovernanceprinciples/31557724.pdf
25 http://www.iccwbo.org/products-and-services/fighting-commercial-crime/resist/