Airbus ran ‘massive’ bribery scheme to win orders

"there’s only two participants in this prisoners‘ dilemma, and they are both, theoretically, under the purview of rigorous enforcement in countries governed by law."

What? No.

There are 1000's of participants, and few of them are under the purview of the law.

1. Someone wants access to a Malaysian Air exec at some hotel event. Bribe someone for info.

2. Someone is overseeing the aircraft regulatory body, their findings will sway one way or another. Bribe them.

3. Someone is drafting legislation to support the state-sponsored purchase of aircraft. Bribe them.

4. The brother of the 'deciding individual' at Malaysian Air hints he can help access. Bribe them.

5. The people responsible for lower-level contractual affairs are putting up a fuss over some little details? Bribe them.

6. The 'respected international consultancy' is putting together the business plan for the national airline strategy. Bribe them.

7. The executives making the purchase want a kickback. Bribe them.

These bribes come in all forms, some of them more or less legal, or more or less ethical - depending on the law.

Does giving the son of the Malay MP drafting relevant legislation a job at Airbus constitute a bribe? Or just congeniality?

Does flying in a team of officials for an all-expenses-paid, swanky getaway at a high-end swiss resort for 'a meeting' constitute a bribe?

In the West, a lot of this happens in fuzzier ways, borderline ethical. In other countries, it's just how business is done.

In other places, like Nigeria, it's pretty straight forward. Once you get to the Nigerian Minister of Natural Resources, he will have spelled out for you by people in his periphery beforehand nature and expected size of the bribe, how it gets transmuted so that nothing 'impolite' happens directly in his presence.

If you're an American IT company that has support offices in the Middle East and Africa that subcontracts the work to local companies, but then wants to end such contracts in favor of direct hires ... and said subcontractors are connected - you will 'pay a bribe' out of the sunshine fund.

If you're IKEA and want to open a store in Moscow, you will pay x% of your revenue to a local 'businessman/thug'. If not - no store! So you wait a decade and realize you have no choice, and so you just pay the appropriate tributes.

Again - the issue is how the plebes in the West are going to react when they start to learn how everything is working.

The only way to 'end' this is to have a lot of various powers on board, and it's going to be different in every country.

It might work out differently in every country, and maybe at different levels of scale, or happen in a different way, i.e. instead of 'kickbacks', execs get lucrative contracts somewhere else or some other kind of benefit.

This will take a few centuries to sort out.

Edit: to be clear I'm not advocating at all for any of these shenanigans.

With the Clintons, the big conflict of interest is the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation.

It's a charity (which apparently does pretty good work) but it pays for a lot of things for the Clintons and gives them tremendous status.

Hillary Clinton accepted 100's of millions into her charity from officials with whom she, as a rep. of the US was directly doing business.

She was caught once, directly conferring titles to an individual who contributed to the fund, and the title had to be removed.

Even though I do not generally believe that this is a form of corruption, it's a massive conflict of interest. Just like an exec how owns 90% of a company and takes office has to put said investment in a 'blind trust' - I believe the Clinton Foundation should have effectively been turned into a 'blind trust' as well.

But there are 100% cases of soft pay for access going on here.

Edit: to be more precise, the Clinton charity accepted money from officials of countries and other orgs that the US was dealing with, wherein Hillary was a rep of the US Gov. Not necessarily individuals she was dealing with directly. I'm not throwing flames here, just saying 'conflict of interest'.

Keyword is "considering"

Has Airbus also caused Boeing plane crashes using bribes?

Article is paywalled, what was the timeline of the bribes happening? Would it be fair to say:

Airbus runs 'massive' bribery scheme -> Airbus wins more orders -> Boeing feels pressure of losing orders -> Boeing execs pressure engineers to cut corners -> Boeing aircraft develop various major safety issues