The European engineering giant settles a massive bribery case, pays US$1.6 billion in fines, and somehow manages to stay off US government blacklists, which (in theory) prohibit giving contracts to companies who pay bribes. Daniel Kaufmann has an analysis of the echoing hollowness of Seimens’s previous CSR commitments.

Kaufmann writes:

“The case of Siemens illustrates what is important and what is not in seriously addressing corporate corruption. As usual, the bottom line resides with incentives: what truly raises the cost of bribing will matter, in contrast with PR-friendly measures that are useless in raising the cost of corruption.”

The whole post is worth reading.
Siemens and the illusion of CSR and codes of business integrity

Kaufmann concludes:

“Now an era is essentially over for the corporate sector: no longer there is credibility to the notion that corporate (or sector-wide group of corporates) self-enforcement, self-regulation or self-principles will individually or collectively work on its own — without serious complementary measures, further transparency and third party monitoring.”

It’s a pretty excellent post.

— Jonathan Eyler-Werve