Airbus bribes: US$ 98 million loss to Lanka but compensation paid to France, UK and US

Even when large-scale foreign bribery schemes-such as when Airbus greased palms in Sri Lanka--are successfully investigated and companies are hit with fines and penalties, victims usually do not receive compensation, Transparency International (TI) said this week.

“Instead, large penalties and fines paid by bribe-paying companies are typically allocated to the treasuries of their home countries. Settlements rarely consider compensating countries adversely affected by the bribery,” it said.

TI was commenting on a ruling by a United State judge this week, ordering Swiss mining and commodity trading giant Glencore to pay US$ 700 million in connection with a long-running corruption probe. Last year, Glencore pleaded guilty to channelling at least US$ 100 million in bribes between 2007 and 2018 to public officials across the world--from Brazil to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and from Nigeria to Venezuela. The company reached a deal with authorities in Brazil, the United Kingdom and the US to pay up to US$ 1.1 billion. This week’s sentence confirms the US portion of the coordinated settlement.

“In a welcome move, the judge also instructed the company to pay almost US$ 30 million in restitution to the founders of a healthcare firm recognised as a victim of Glencore’s conduct in the DRC. But this does not address the full scope. There are likely more populations, entities and individuals who suffered harm from Glencore’s scheme.

There must be a more comprehensive effort to identify and adequately compensate all those affected--particularly the most vulnerable,” TI said.

Highlighting the Airbus case, TI pointed out the company was implicated in bribing foreign officials between at least 2008 and 2015 to win business abroad. It signed a plea deal in January 2020 and agreed to pay record penalties of US$ 3.9 billion to France, the UK and the US, all of which investigated the scheme.

“Notably absent from the Airbus agreements were any plans to compensate the countries and people where the company paid bribes, including Colombia, Ghana, Indonesia and Sri Lanka--something we did not think was right. In Sri Lanka alone, experts estimated a minimum of US$ 98 million in losses for the public due to the scheme. This did not sit well with our chapter in Sri Lanka, which expressed concern to UK authorities about inadequate compensation for victims,” TI said.

“Disappointingly, they received a response justifying the lack of compensation on the grounds that the loss from the criminal conduct was hard to measure and there was no evidence that any of the products or services sold by Airbus to customers were defective or unwanted,” it observed.