Big bribes and little bribes....
What did you do when government officials asked your employees for bribes?
"We had a discussion with the board when we started. We said, "It's not enough for the board sitting in its nice, cozy headquarters in Europe to make statements about anticorruption. What is needed is to offer support to our local people." Because who comes under pressure for bribes? It's not the guys at the top of the company but the people operating in the country. And each operation is actually a local company headed by a CEO. The scheme we came up with was very simple. We said that the CEO and the local management did not have the power to sign any check in excess of $30,000. It was intentionally quite low to make sure that when a minister or a senior official came to put pressure on the CEO, he could say, "You're asking for two million? I need to write to the board to ask for permission." No president or prime minister would dare to submit a request to ask for a bribe." (From Africa Calling - A Conversation With Mo Ibrahim )
"We had a discussion with the board when we started. We said, "It's not enough for the board sitting in its nice, cozy headquarters in Europe to make statements about anticorruption. What is needed is to offer support to our local people." Because who comes under pressure for bribes? It's not the guys at the top of the company but the people operating in the country. And each operation is actually a local company headed by a CEO. The scheme we came up with was very simple. We said that the CEO and the local management did not have the power to sign any check in excess of $30,000. It was intentionally quite low to make sure that when a minister or a senior official came to put pressure on the CEO, he could say, "You're asking for two million? I need to write to the board to ask for permission." No president or prime minister would dare to submit a request to ask for a bribe." (From Africa Calling - A Conversation With Mo Ibrahim )
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