One of the most basic legal principles is that crime should not pay – Yet this OECD chapter will show that, in many jurisdictions with weak sanctions, foreign bribery may be an attractive investment. In others, foreign bribery is subject to strong penalties, although some of these penalties exist only on paper because they are not backed up by effective enforcement.
Only a few countries combine strong sanctions with active enforcement of anti-bribery laws.
Thus, this chapter paints a picture of fragmented deterrence across the 41 Parties to the Anti-Bribery Convention.
This patchwork of incentives and disincentives for foreign bribery is explored using simulations of “net present value” for “investments in foreign bribery” under assumptions of both certainty and uncertainty.
The simulations draw on sanctions data produced by the OECD Working Group on Bribery for each of the 41 Parties to the Anti-Bribery Convention and on the cash flows – including both bribes and benefits – associated with a real-world bribery scenario.
They show, in particular, that in many countries having low fines for paying bribery, a company would still be willing to “invest” in a foreign bribery scheme even if it knew in advance that it would be caught and fined at the end of the bribery scenario. This implies that fines for bribery are set too low in many jurisdictions.
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