Employees of a multinational oil company are to receive training on a new policy that forbids them to pay bribes to ease business deals.
BP, which operates in 100 countries in six continents, is setting up workshops and seminars in various parts of the world to help staff implement the policy, which states that they should no longer make small ‘facilitation payments’ to low-ranking officials for administrative services.
Staff recently received a letter from BP chairman Lord Browne outlining the stance. BP began work on the policy in early 2001, when it received unfavourable publicity after admitting to a UK parliamentary hearing that although it discouraged facilitation payments, it did allow them ‘at local management discretion’.
A UK law passed earlier this year means companies risk prosecution if they offer bribes to foreign officials when bidding for contracts (EP3, issue 7), although this applies only to a multinational’s main operations, not its subsidiaries.
BP said it had adopted the policy partly to counter allegations, which it has denied, that the company was habitually bribing local administrators.
‘Many places do not recognize a difference between facilitation payments and bribes, and some parties chose to portray BP as tolerant of paying bribes,’ it said. ‘We have accepted that our position on this should be strengthened to re-enforce our overall strong anti-corruption stance.’
The policy makes it clear that BP staff anywhere in the world should now make no facilitation payments.
‘Now that we have made sure everybody is aware of the change we need to help people work out how it applies to them,’ the company said.
‘There are different issues according to the different local conditions in various countries, so we need the workshops to allow employees to work through them with experts.’
The company has set up regional ethics committees to act as a point of contact for employees and answer queries about the policy. Each BP business unit has also been assigned an ‘audit relationship manager’ to coach employees on bribery issues and offer ‘independent support’.
BP’s first director of business ethics, Stewart Broome, has played a key part in developing the policy. Broome was appointed in October 2001 to promote ethical and responsible business conduct throughout the organization, and to ‘help manage the group’s ethical agenda’.
Broome is reviewing BP’s ethical conduct policy this year and will revise it ‘if appropriate’.
BP’s global employee matching fund, introduced in December 2000 to support community work by employees, raised $10.3million (£7.2m) for charitable organizations around the world in its first year. The company added $8.1m to the money raised by employees. More than 56,000 hours were volunteered by BP staff over the year.
BP employs 107,000 people around the world.