Baker Hughes pays $44 million in plea deal on foreign bribes

Houston Chronicle:

A unit of oil-field services company Baker Hughes has agreed to pay $44 million to end federal investigations into alleged violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

This marks the largest penalty agreed to in a series of recent cases brought under the act, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice.

The company, the world's third-largest oil-field services firm, had disclosed in 2002 and 2003 that it was in talks with government officials about settling cases related to the investigations.

The commission claimed Baker Hughes Services International paid money to middlemen in Kazakhstan knowing that it would be used as bribes to win business.

It also alleged violations of the act in other countries.

Separately, the Justice Department brought criminal charges against the company related to is operations in Kazakhstan.

The settlement includes payment of a criminal fine of $11 million, a $10 million civil penalty, and more than $23 million in profit the company made in Kazakhstan.

The fine was especially high, commission officials said, because the company violated a related 2001 cease-and-desist order.

...
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has been around since the 1970's. Initially the SEC brought cases for failure to disclose the payment of bribes after then SEC Enforcement Chief Stanley Sporkin raised questions about how the payments could be made and not show up on company books. Businesses had justified the payments as the cost of doing business in certain countries and felt that the restrictions put them at a competitive disadvantage.

Bribes are inherently anti capitalistic. Rather than giving the business to the guy with the best product and service at the market is distorted by payments or kickbacks to corrupt officials. It is in fact a corruption of the marketplace. To engage in this type of conduct while already under a cease and desist order is more than dumb.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more