You mean there's an International organisation that says it doesn't accept / give bungs on third-world contracts and then actually *does* something about it?

Who are these people and what planet are they from originally?

Reminds me of the old Russian joke about the ram.

An Old Georgian man is trying to get into Moscow University carrying a tied up ram on his shoulder. The security at the door starts shouting at him. "Tovarish, vy kuda s baranom?" (translation - comrade, where are going with this ram?). Answer: "Kakoj, baran? Glupuy Baran v universitete, eto bakshish assistentu" (translation - What ram, the daft ram is in the university, this is just a tip for his tutor". Or the story when one of the Georgian (or russian... forgot) teams got disqualified by the UEFA for bribing the officials. They apparently gave each a welcome present - a real ankle length beaver fur coat. And I am not even talking about the slavic habit of doing all business at the table during a 5 course meal.

What is a bribe for us, in some parts of the world is actually the means of doing business. If one does not like it he should not try to do business with these parts of the world are limit himself solely to other parts which share the same concepts of hospitality and presents.

In that their their financial controls are equally as bad as their consulting practice, project management and delivery controls.

I've worked with useless Wipro folks before. The ones we got were as thick as pig shit. I was actually part of the interview process until so many were getting rejected (17 in a row) that my manager (Indian himself) asked for the list of questions we were using!! No joke. We gave him a dumbed-down list.

Their next trick was to have a 'customer representative' sat with the candidates during interviews (all interviews were initially phone based). The amount of times the phone went on mute whilst they the customer rep 'explained the question' to the candidate was crazy.

And then after a week of them having the dumbed-down question sheet we started getting scripted droid answers to the questions... until we asked them questions from the sheet we'd kept private, at which point they face on their asses again.

It was comical to watch but at the same time it wasted so much of our time that in the end we got quite pissed off.

Anyway, in the end both myself and the other interviewer was taken off 'interview duties'. Suprise suprise two weeks later six turned up!! My manager just over-ruled our decision.

We than had to live with these idiots for 2 years until I left the company (then got re-employed but in a different team).

We all thought that he was on the take back then...

Are bungs a documented part of their CMM accredited processes or do they need to be reassessed?

Wha?

I non comprendez the ram joke - can someone explain?

Guess they don't have a benevolent PM to stop the SFO investigation.

Oh wait, this was the World Bank and not the SFO.

The Wipro debarment happened in June 2007.

I notice that countries with most debarred companies are UK (~35), Indonesia (~18), Sweden (~11) and the US (~10). Nigeria is at 6, India at 3 and Singapore at 1. Even Burkina Faso has managed to get a couple of companies on the list. Some of the debarments go back to 2001 and are for life.

The complete ding list is here http://web.worldbank.org/external/default/main?theSitePK=84266&contentMDK=64069844&menuPK=116730&pagePK=64148989&piPK=64148984&sort_on=DEBAR_FROM_DATE&sort_order=ascending&sort_data=text

Is a bribe for us.

We shouldn't do it.

Much like the Japanese minimum age of consent is (IIRC) 14. Yet Gary Glitter popping over there for a bit of Asian Teen action would be arrested for paedophillia in the UK.

So what if we lose contracts? We don't lose the bribe either.

And what if "their way of doing business" was ritual cannibalism? Would that be OK?

If it's a bribe to use, WE don't do it.

My old form was one of the first to send work over to India. Biggest mistake we ever made. We all knew it was bad but the board saw a way to save a buck.

After just a short time a man days work was twice as much in India as it was to do in the UK. Projects slowed to a crawl, specifications were screwed up, consultation was endless and we had to send no end of them back to India as when we got them in front of a PC to do their thing, they just stared at it apologetically. Yes we got so 'into India' we were bringing them to the UK to do work. We kept reporting how bad it was yet they still kept turning up, something was afoot.

Most of the work has now been pulled back to the UK, and a lot of rental apartments in the city are now empty. Still the damage has been done, we didnt deliver one major piece of work in the whole 5 years or innovate anything. It was a shambles.

The latest? My Gf's boss is now saying that all the 'hot code' is now coming out of Vietnam.

Strewth, here we go again.

Wipro claims the scheme was SEC approved.

People who dealt with WB IT might tell you this is pot and kettle stuff.

I have to ask: how common is this "banning companies" stuff?

These guys have all sorts of marquee customers all over the place, and I hadn't heard of any other such bans so either (a) all the other organisations are too corrupt to do the same thing, and WB is a shining beacon of integrity (cough cough Wolfowitz cough cough) or (b) WB is the only place where the staff is on the take.

Anyway if anyone knows of other similar bans please post... Maybe they're all over the place and I haven't heard...

I'm also wondering why there're no reports of staffers receiving the bribes being fired. Shouldn't that be part of the same exercise?

Is it that difficult to see who's normally the bigger culprit in any bribing episode, and makes the bribing necessary and possible in the first place?