Many will cheer the news that engineering and oil services companies Halliburton and Kellogg Brown & Root have been fined for bribery. But this is no occasion for finger-pointing. By exposing and punishing offenders, the US, far from embarrassing itself, has shown the strength of its laws.
Last week, KBR and its former parent company Halliburton settled charges of violating the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, accepting fines of $579m - the second largest ever for FCPA violations. To secure a deal for a gas liquefaction plant in Nigeria, KBR paid over $180m in bribes to top-level Nigerian government and national oil company officials. The account of KBR's corruption - the company and its then-chairman Albert Jack Stanley pleaded guilty - resembles the stuff of action films, complete with cash-filled suitcases. But there is nothing entertaining about this case. It amounts to looting - no euphemism will do - from the ordinary people of Nigeria, most of whom must survive on less than $2 a day according to the World Bank.
The two companies are among the world's most vilified. Their lucrative contracts with the US government in occupied Iraq and their association with Dick Cheney - who led Halliburton before becoming US vice-president - earned them a place as anti-Americanism's favourite voodoo dolls, not least in Europe. But the settlements give Europeans no licence to gloat: the biggest ever FCPA-related fine was paid by Germany's Siemens.
The US pioneered the international fight against corruption when it passed the FCPA in 1977. The law makes it illegal for companies operating in the US to make corrupt payments to public officials anywhere in the world. In most other countries, bribes to foreign officials remained not only legal but tax-deductible well into the 1990s. Admittedly, the US took its time to start enforcing the FCPA aggressively, but in recent years it has helped to uncover a large number of corruption cases, frequently related to oil.
Europe and Japan improved laws in response to public opinion and international commitments such as the OECD anti-bribery treaty. But enforcement is lagging, as BAE Systems's al-Yamamah case showed in the UK. In France, the Elf affair was uncovered only thanks to the courage of individual magistrates standing up to a complicit establishment. China, Russia and India do far too little to restrain (often state-owned) companies accused of leading a bribery race to the bottom overseas.
The US has its villains. But its system ultimately reins them in. Other countries have much to learn.
