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Bribery and Corruption: What’s the best approach?

On Feb. 17, Samsung empire’s heir Lee Jae-yong was arrested on corruption and bribery charges connected to a nationwide political scandal in South Korea. While this is unlikely to directly impact the global tech behemoth in day-to-day matters, it is important to investigate how firms and governments can work together more successfully to combat white collar crime and corruption.

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An international affair
The fight against bribery and corruption has historically been led by the United States, the first country to implement tough legislation with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977. The federal law was enacted to address accounting transparency requirements and to make bribery of foreign government officials illegal.

Europe is not far behind with a range of legislation designed to prosecute and punish corporate crime. Other emerging market governments are finally cracking down as well, holding both domestic and foreign businesses and their senior management, to account.

Tackling bribery and corruption requires prosecutors and regulators that are properly equipped to investigate and deal with complex factual and legal issues. It also requires a judiciary that is impartial and can operate without political interference.

The United Kingdom’s Bribery Act of 2010 is a good example of tough new legislation that regulators and prosecutors can rely upon when investigating such crimes. It has extra-territorial reach both for U.

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K. companies operating abroad and for overseas companies with a presence in the U.K. It also introduced a new strict liability offence for companies and partnerships of failing to prevent bribery.

The law is not enough
Unfortunately however, even the best legal framework in the world is insufficient on its own.

Companies need to understand exactly how to go about preventing unlawful behavior, particularly in new and distant markets that their headquarters may not clearly understand. Ultimately, the real responsibility and accountability remains with the business to ensure compliance.

Countries with robust criminal and anti-corruption laws might be able to prosecute those individuals or businesses that commit offences within or outside the jurisdiction but the problem will continue until international businesses rigorously apply universal global standards to tackle corruption across emerging markets.

It’s Still about the culture
In short, this issue is about corporate culture. The following are fundamental steps for fine-tuning your organization’s approach to corruption:

• Develop a culture through education, where turning a blind eye to unlawful activity is not an option. Staff should feel comfortable with speaking out if they see anything potentially suspicious. Anti-bribery and corruption training needs to be repeated and made relevant to the day-to-day scenarios employees at different levels might face.

• The tone must be set at the top. For instance it can be useful to educate your firm’s directors with formal governance training, such as from the Institute of Directors (IoD) in London.

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This level of top-level attention to corporate compliance programs, including training, should be the norm.

• Proper dialogue needs to be established with regulators—not just a one-way stream of new laws and compliance requirements. A regulator should seek the views of those it is regulating.
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This two-way approach really does work.

Business Interruption Seen as Top Risk Globally

A survey of more than 1,200 risk managers and corporate insurance experts in over 50 countries identified business interruption as the top concern for 2017. According to the sixth annual Allianz Risk Barometer of top business risks, this is the fifth successive year that business interruption has been seen as the biggest risk.
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“Companies worldwide are bracing for a year of uncertainty,” Chris Fischer Hirs, CEO of AGCS said in a statement. “They are concerned about rather unpredictable changes in the legal, geopolitical and market environment around the world. A range of new risks are emerging beyond the perennial perils of fire and natural catastrophes and require re-thinking of current monitoring and risk management tools.”

While natural disasters and fires are what businesses fear most, non-damage events such as a cyber incident, terrorism or political violence resulting in denial of access are moving higher up on the scale, according to the report. These types of incidents can cause large loss of income to companies, without actual physical loss.

The second concern, market developments, could result from stagnant markets or M&As, or from digitalization and use of new technologies.

Cyberrisk, third on the list of perils, has jumped up from 15th place in just four years. Cyber was identified as the second concern in the United States and Europe.

According to Allianz:

The results indicate that cyber risk occupies a significant portion of a company’s exposure map. The risk now goes far and beyond the issue of privacy and data breaches. A single incident, be it a technical glitch, human error or an attack, can lead to severe business interruption, loss of market share and cause reputational damage. Of the top 10 global risks in the 2017 Allianz Risk Barometer, a cyber incident could be a potential root cause or trigger for 50% of them. In addition, the toughening of data protection regulation regimes around the world is also contributing to this risk being at the forefront of risk managers’ minds, as penalties for non-compliance are increasingly severe.

Fourth on the list, natural catastrophes added up to $150 billion in total economic losses in 2016—with insured losses accounting for $42 billion of those losses—up from $28 billion in 2015, according to the report. Businesses also are more concerned about the impact of climate change and increasing weather volatility year-on-year.

Trump outlook for 2017

“Opportunities and challenges,” says Ludovic Subran, head of Euler Hermes Economic Research and deputy chief economist of Allianz research. “Companies which are domestic, either a regional multinational or national, will benefit. However, the business environment for large multi-national corporations who do have global, strongly regionally diversified business models will be more challenging. Stronger regional interests will make the lives of companies more complicated as there will be increasing protectionist regulation.”

Plan Now for the Political and Risk Landscape Ahead

With a new president in office in 2017, there are sure to be changes ahead for businesses in the United States. Yet of risk professionals surveyed, fewer than half are actively preparing. Organizations are expected to see impact in areas including regulation and enforcement strategies, a new national trade policy, and a potential rollback of Affordable Care Act (ACA) provisions, according to Marsh.

Speakers on Marsh’s webcast, The New Reality of Risk, noted that the new administration appears to favor deregulation across several industries including financial services, although a complete repeal of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is unlikely, said Arthur Long, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. The Trump administration is also expected to reduce regulation in the energy industry and others.

Areas to watch, according to the webcast:

  • Regulation and Taxes
    Less regulation and lower taxes are the most significant changes that are expected next year, both of which are expected to benefit businesses, said Michael Poulos, president of Marsh Risk Consulting. A stronger dollar could also help larger companies with extensive operations overseas, while others could benefit from changes in credit and monetary policies.
  • Trade Policy
    Changes in trade policy — including a move away from free-trade agreements — could alter the trade credit market, said Michael Kornblau, Marsh’s US Trade Credit Practice leader. These changes could lead to balance-sheet pressures — including reductions in sales and working capital — on companies with more than half of their revenues outside of the US.
  • Health Care
    Meanwhile, the future of the ACA (commonly referred to as Obamacare) remains uncertain for health care organizations and employers, said Mark Karlson, Marsh’s US HealthCare Practice leader, as transition officials have made sometimes conflicting statements about whether they will pursue repeal, replacement, or amendment of the existing law. If any changes are made to the law, it may be some time before they take effect.
  • Cyber Risk
    The election also highlighted cyber risks for businesses, including the potential threat of hackers and the need to encrypt corporate emails, said Tom Fuhrman, Cybersecurity Consulting and Advisory Services Practice leader at Marsh Risk Consulting. Generally, cyber regulations are expected to focus more on ensuring effective risk management for businesses rather than the existence of specific controls.

Although uncertainty remains about many specific policy changes to be made under the new administration, businesses should be thinking about the potential effects of new policies on their operations. Among other steps, businesses should:

  • Stay up-to-date on policy and regulatory proposals from transition and administration officials and develop a post-election game plan that includes actions and strategies that can be taken in preparation for regulatory changes.
  • Assess how reliant they are on global economic models that could become further strained.
  • Plan to reassess their risk more frequently than they have in recent years, according to Marsh.
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Water Scarcity Risk: Not Just a Local Political Issue

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There are few issues as politically charged as water, not only because people’s survival depends on it, but also because it is a critical component of so many industries. Agriculture, food and beverage manufacturers, refineries, paper and pulp companies, electronics manufacturers, mining operations and power plants—are of these rely on a continuous and reliable water supply.

When companies move into markets with weak infrastructure or questionable rule of law, drawing on these resources can quickly bring them into conflict with local citizens and, sometimes, the host government. Because of its vital importance, however, water scarcity has become much more than a local issue for businesses.

Water shortages can lead to conflict as competition grows for diminishing resources, as any scarce resource on which people depend is likely to become political at some point in time. One scenario that repeatedly unfolds is as follows: A mining operation depletes local water resources or has a tailings dam accident that contaminates a local river, a protest ensues and the host government intervenes in the project.

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Hydroelectric power projects can create a number of similar political risks and some different ones, including relocation of local villages.

In recent years, however, awareness has grown about how water scarcity risk affects political risk at the national and international levels, requiring a different type of analysis.

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The depletion of rivers, lakes and streams has led to more dependence on below-ground water. More than two-thirds of groundwater used around the world is for irrigating crops, and the rest of below-ground water is used to supply cities’ drinking water.

For centuries, below-ground water supplies served as a backup to carry regions and countries through droughts and warm winters that lacked enough snowmelt to replenish rivers and streams. Now, the world’s largest underground water reserves in Africa, Eurasia and the Americas are under stress, with many of them being drawn down at unsustainable rates. Nearly two billion people rely on groundwater that is considered under threat.

What makes the problem particularly difficult to solve in the emerging markets is that small, often subsistence, farmers are doing the drilling for water. The U.S. military called climate change, including reduced access to water, a “threat multiplier,” potentially threatening the stability of governments, increasing inter-state conflict, and contributing to extremist ideologies and terrorism.

It is always difficult to establish causality with something as complex as politics, but there certainly is circumstantial evidence that water scarcity was a factor in the Syrian uprisings that led to the country’s civil war. In Yemen, some hydrologists warn the country may be the first to actually run out of usable water within a decade, and combatants are making a bad situation even worse by using water and food as weapons against opposing villages. In Sudan, desertification and water scarcity have been cited as having a strong link to the Darfur conflict.

Since water does not respect political borders, the conflicts can become international.  One of the most high-profile disputes has been Ethiopia’s damming of the Nile River for hydroelectric power, potentially threatening Egypt’s ancient water source. In 2013, Egypt’s then-president said he did not want war but he would not allow Egypt’s water supply to be endangered by the dam. Fortunately, in 2015, Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan signed an agreement allowing dam construction, provided that it did not cause “significant harm” to downstream countries. But the studies into how much harm it could do have not even been completed yet, and the dammed water could be diverted to uses other than power. Thus, the political risk surrounding the Nile River is far from over. Since 1975, Turkey’s construction of dams for irrigation and power have cut water flow into Syria by 40% and into Iraq by 80%, setting off disputes there.

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Companies are accustomed to building water into their business plans in developing countries. Environmental impact assessments and proactive community relations programs can bring potential problems to the surface before they start, helping companies manage water in an environmentally and socially prudent manner. The geopolitical risks around water scarcity can be more difficult to manage, however. In this area, companies should consider building water scarcity into their political risk management and forecasting frameworks, factoring it in when making investment and supply chain decisions. If governments cannot find ways of sharing this limited resource, political violence risk may become even more of a factor for international businesses to consider.

This article previously appeared on Zurichna.com.