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Siemens Bribery and Corruption Ethical Violation Case

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Many ethical issues have been surfacing in the last decade due to the hand in hand prosper of international business globalization. The ethical concerns include corruption, bribery, human rights issues among many others. Business ethics is a form of professional ethics or applied ethics that examines moral or ethical problems that arise in a business enviroment. It involves the application of moral behavior to business situations (Adeyeye, 2012 p 22). Bribery is the offering, receiving, soliciting, and giving of something of value in order to influence an action of an official or company in offering of legal or public duties. A bribe is a gift that is bestowed in order to influence the recipients conduct and the extent of the influence …show more content…

The executives were involved in the company’s decade long bribery scheme in Argentina. The officials engaged in bribery in order to maintain their 1 billion euro contract that they had with the government to produce national identity cards for the Argentine citizens (Posner, 2009 p 101-103). The corruption scheme lasted from 1996 to early 2007. In the early 1990, the Argentine government developed a plan that would see it give every Argentine citizen an electronic ID card. Siemens, in order to obtain the contract that was 1.26 billion us dollars, bribed some Argentine officials with an estimated 70 million U.S dollars. The government in 1998 finally signed the contract with Siemens (Posner, 2009 p 101-103). However, a change in the countries administration structure later revealed the contract. After Fernando de La Rua became the president of the country, the official that came with him in the office questioned the contract on the basis that each Argentine electronic ID card reported by Siemens cost the double of what the government had estimated (Posner, 2009 p 102). The government therefore suspended and cancelled the contract. However, during the president’s term in office, Siemens was informed by an intermediary that 27 million US dollars bribery would see the contract resurrected. The company, in order to revive the contract, paid additional bribes until 2004 in an attempt that failed to yield any results since the

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