Multinational Companies Unite to Fight Bribery

January 27, 2005

EUROPEAN BUSINESS NEWS


Multinational Companies
Unite to Fight Bribery

By GLENN R. SIMPSON
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 27, 2005

DAVOS, Switzerland -- Some of the world's biggest construction and natural-resources companies, their industries beset by corruption investigations around the globe, are starting to coalesce around a plan to clean house themselves.

Chief executives of Newmont Mining Corp. of Denver, Rio Tinto PLC of London and Bechtel Group Inc. of San Francisco, global leaders of their industries, are signing onto a "zero tolerance" pact against paying bribes being sponsored by a coalition of groups working with the World Economic Forum, according to company executives and forum organizers. Altogether 47 large multinational companies committed to the pact as of last night, representing at least $300 billion in annual revenue. "The momentum is building," said Fluor Corp. Chief Executive Alan Boeckmann, an organizer of the project.

The world's five largest oil companies -- many of whose top executives are here -- also are being pressed to sign before the agreement's planned announcement tomorrow, but none have yet agreed. Officials of Royal Dutch/Shell Group and Total SA said they were considering the idea but already had their own zero-tolerance policies. A spokesman for London-based BP PLC said the company had declined to sign for that reason. Donald Campbell, a ChevronTexaco spokesman, noted that U.S. law bars U.S. companies from engaging in bribery. But he said the document being circulated in Davos is "the kind of thing that we would like to support." Tom Cirigliano, of Exxon Mobil, said signing the document would be "redundant," because the company already has a zero-tolerance policy against bribery and because bribery is against U.S. law. He said he didn't know whether the company will sign.

sign something of the sort??

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040112&s=ireland
Will the French Indict Cheney?
by Doug Ireland

Y et another sordid chapter in the murky annals of Halliburton might well lead to the indictment of Dick Cheney by a French court on charges of bribery, money-laundering and misuse of corporate assets.

At the heart of the matter is a $6 billion gas liquification factory built in Nigeria on behalf of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton--the company Cheney headed before becoming Vice President--in partnership with a large French petroengineering company, Technip. Nigeria has been rated by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International as the second-most corrupt country in the world, surpassed only by Bangladesh.

tactic.