Bribery / Corruption

Bribery has no first case, but the modern international crime dates from Washington in 1977, when the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was passed after the SEC found over 400 US companies, including Lockheed, had paid foreign officials to win contracts.

Bribery has no single inventor: early legal codes and religious texts already prohibited paying officials for favours. The modern fight against cross-border bribery began with the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, passed after SEC inquiries in the mid-1970s (including the Lockheed scandal) revealed that US companies had paid officials abroad to win contracts. The OECD Anti-Bribery Convention (1997) and the UK Bribery Act (2010) extended the model internationally. Large 21st-century cases such as Siemens (2008), Odebrecht/Operation Car Wash (2014-2016) and Malaysia's 1MDB fund show bribes routed through consultants, shell companies and offshore accounts. In the crypto era the method also targets insiders: in May 2025 Coinbase disclosed that overseas support contractors had been bribed to leak customer data later used in impersonation scams.

Someone offers money, gifts, jobs or other benefits to a person with decision-making power, such as an official, procurement officer or company insider, in exchange for a contract, licence, favourable ruling or confidential data. Payments are usually disguised as consulting fees, commissions, donations or inflated invoices, and are often routed through intermediaries and shell companies. The cost is later recovered through overpriced contracts or poor-quality work, so taxpayers, shareholders or customers ultimately pay. Insider bribery can also leak customer data that fuels other scams.

A bribe is a business cost, often a few per cent of a contract worth billions, and it buys certainty that no marketing budget can; the OECD found 57% of foreign-bribery cases were to win public contracts. The IMF estimated bribes at $1.5-2 trillion a year (2016), and most are never detected because both sides benefit and the money moves through intermediaries and shell companies. Prosecutions mainly hit companies, which settle (Airbus $3.9 billion, Odebrecht $3.5 billion), while individual officials in weak jurisdictions are rarely convicted.

The IMF estimated bribes paid worldwide at about $1.5-2 trillion a year, roughly 2% of global GDP (2016, estimate). The largest resolved cases are Airbus ($3.9 billion in penalties, 2020), Odebrecht/Braskem ($3.5 billion, 2016) and Siemens (about $1.6 billion in US and German penalties, 2008), and 1MDB, from which $4.5 billion was diverted with bribes to Malaysian officials. The non-money harm is unsafe infrastructure, overpriced public services and, in Brazil, a political crisis that toppled governments.