Business Ethics: Simens Bribery Scandal

In 2006 and 2007, several bribery scandals were unearthed at Siemens AG(Siemens), including some of the company’s employees bribing foreign officials to gain contracts and creating slush funds for this purpose and the company bribing some of their representatives on the supervisory board in order to gain their support for its policies.

Apparently, it is unethical for the company’s employees to bribe foreign officials to gain contracts. It is unfair for its competitors and will probably and actually did force their rivals to do the same thing in order to keep up in the intense global competition. Simultaneously, it made those officials who are not supposed to gain any profits from these contracts actually gain money and increased the unnecessary cost of competition in global markets. However, those costs can be used to advance their products and technology. What they did actually decreased the overall efficiency of resources.

The second scandal is unethical because it made the decision-making process unfair and opaque, resulting in those representatives existing in name only. The company was actually cheating on their employees in the situation that their employees have rights to know what’s going on and decide whether some policies should be carried out.

More details please refer to the following link

http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800518742_499488_NT_ba36b1cc.HTM