Focus by Eric G. Major CEO Latitude Consultancy Limited for the Investment Migration Council (IMC)
RCBI FIRMS SHOULD “KNOW THEIR ABC”
S
Twenty-five years ago, corruption was seen as the necessary price of doing business and something so deeply ingrained that exposing and fighting it was regarded as futile and even harmful. But thankfully, we live in a much different world today, with citizens, media and politicians in many regions actively condemning abuses of power.
26
Such change in attitude is partly due to the exposure of past scandals and their consequences. Indeed, even the biggest names in business have been tainted - pick your story: Airbus, Odebrecht, Bombardier, Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent; in all of these cases, paying bribes was viewed as the way to make the wheels of business turn. Did you know that certain bribes paid abroad were technically tax deductible for German companies until 1999? They could simply categorise them as “useful expenditures”, as long as those expenses were not incurred in Germany and there were no foreign state officials involved. In 2006, however, it became clear that Siemens, one of Germany’s biggest companies, was taking corporate bribery to a whole new level. For over a decade, it paid bribes to government officials and civil servants around the world, amounting to approximately US$1.4 billion. While corrupt decision makers profited, citizens in the affected countries paid the costs of overpriced necessities such as roads and power plants.
France’s Parquet National Financier and America’s Justice and State Departments. The size of the fine, which dwarfs other bribery-related settlements in recent years, reflects serious, wide-ranging allegations concerning Airbus’s use of external consultants to bribe customers to buy its civilian and military aircraft in a number of markets.
In a more recent example, in January this year, Airbus agreed to a record-breaking settlement to resolve allegations of bribery with regulators in three countries. The plane-maker will pay a total of US$4 billion to Britain’s Serious Fraud Office,
Latitude Consultancy Limited assisted the IMC with the drafting of its new ABC Policy, which aims to support the industry in fostering an anticorruption culture by providing its members and stakeholders specific guidelines on how to conduct
THE CITIZEN
The engineering and airplane industries aren’t the only sectors that have business comingling with government to bring benefit to both. Now in its third decade of existence, the Residence & Citizenship-by-Investment (RCBI) industry may have demonstrated some questionable practices in its infancy years, but we can confidently say that it is now showing signs of maturity and credibility through the introduction of a new industry education and certification programme, as well as a new Anti-Bribery and Corruption Policy (ABC Policy) which came into effect on March 1st 2020, both introduced by the Investment Migration Council (IMC).
