DEVELOPMENT: Anti-Bribery Pledges Will Help Crack Global Curse

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ramesh Jaura

BONN, Dec 16 1994 (IPS) - Developing country governments could help crack the global phenomenon of corruption by awarding contracts only to corporations which have signed an anti-bribery pledge, according to a former World Bank official Peter Eigen.

Eigen chairs the Berlin-based ‘Transparency International’ (TI), a non-profit and non-governmental organisation, set up in May 1993 with the active participation of the South.

South’s decision to impose an anti-corruption conditionality might pressurise the governments in the North to take seriously the recommendations of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) issued May this year.

The OECD urged the 25-member states to take effective action to combat corruption in international business transactions. First on the list of recommended steps is to make bribery of foreign public officials a crime. An OECD working group will monitor the follow- up process.

The recommendation was in part a result of lobbying by TI and would bring European businessmen on a par with their counterparts in the United States. There the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) makes bribery to foreign officials a crime under national law. It was enacted in 1977.

Washington drew consequences from disclosures that United States corporations had engaged in widespread bribery to win foreign orders. The bribers included major corporations such as Lockheed, United Brands, Northrop and Gulf. The bribe takers included a Japanese prime minister, an Italian defence minister, a president of Honduras, as well as Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.

TI did not wish to expose corruption, as Amnesty International laid bare human rights violations, but to monitor developments, coordinate international action and build broad-based coalition against the global phenomenon of bribe-giving and bribe-taking in business transactions, said Eigen. Twenty months after its launch, TI had drawn on the support of national chapters that had sprung up in seven countries of the North and 25 in Africa, Asian and Latin America.

They are being set up by activists from Ecuador to Namibia, from Bangladesh to the United States, from Sri Lanka to the Philippines. Some of these are existing organisations, keen to join TI’s international solidarity movement. Others are wholly new initiatives. TI’s suuporters include: Nobel Laureate Oscar Arias, former President of Costa Rica; Alberto Dahik, the Vice President of Ecuador; and former Nigerian President General Olusegun Obasanjo, chairman of ‘Africa Leadership Forum’.