Was blind but now I see

"A man's errors are his portals of discovery," said the Irish writer James Joyce. Two presenters at MIS Training Institute's recent Fraud & Corruption Summit in Copenhagen tell of how their employers learnt through bitter experience the cost of fraud and corruption, then turned things around. By Esther Martin.

Siemens’ story

Back in December 2008 – when the electronics colossus Siemens pleaded guilty to violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – Linda Thomsen, director of enforcement for the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), described the scope of Siemens’ bribery at a press conference as “astonishing”, while Matthew Friedrich, the acting US assistant attorney general, commented, “The tone set at the top at Siemens was a corporate culture in which bribery was tolerated and even rewarded at the highest levels of the company … Bribery was nothing less than standard operating procedure for Siemens.”