Fighting Corruption in International Business

Reports of purported international corruption involving large firms and governmental authorities of the host countries are frequently featured in the media. For example, in 2002, owing of purported irregularities in the plant’s commissioning, Thames Water, the largest water utility in Britain, was asked to renegotiate a contract to manage a $891 million Turkish Water plant. Investigations were also conducted against many Turkish government officials for possible wrongdoing in granting a government guarantee for the project. However, despite widespread media coverage of these cases, accusations of big corruption have not decreased. Following special audits ordered by the UN High Representative in Bosnia, the British Serious Fraud Office (SFO) began looking into the London-based power trading company EFT in 2005 for possible corruption in the Balkans. The claim was that representatives of a state-owned power company may have accepted bribes in order to negotiate favourable electricity-swap agreements with private businesses, and that $11 million in US government funding intended to supply electricity to the region’s war-torn states was instead transferred to offshore accounts. More recently, the SFO’s choice to end the inquiry Another example is the widely reported claims of bribery surrounding BAE’s arms negotiations with Saudi Arabia.